I want to be clear at the outset about one thing: you will not find a ton of reviews on this blog. If you do, it means I’ve successfully maintained it for many many years or farmed out reviews to a squadron of AI interns.

I strive for depth when I write a review, not breadth. I am not going to try to place the reviewed game within the canon of games similar to it. I greatly value reviewers who have that breadth of knowledge and the time to play enough games and cohere their thoughts about them, but that is not me. As you can read elsewhere, this blog is about spending quality time with a few games, not speed dating dozens.

I also don’t pretend to be objective in my reviews. I write about why the game was meaningful to me, which is by definition not objective. I let myself go on tangents about why the game was personally relevant. More narrative and fewer bullet points.

That being said, bullet points have their place.

I have a few goals in reviewing a game:

• Discuss the standard elements of a review in a way that more holistically communicates my experience of the game, rather than structuring the review as Components, Rulebook, Theme, and so on.
• Spark conversation and share my love and appreciation for this hobby. 

There are a couple of things I avoid:

• Rating scales. A rating scale is useful when applied to a group of similar games, but becomes useless the more different the games are from one another. In other words, comparing the ratings of Arkham Horror and Earthborne Rangers is more instructive than Arkham Horror and Friday.
• Reviewing with your wallet in mind. My reviews are not intended to help you make a purchasing decision. You can certainly use it that way, but I want to avoid writing about games through the Value lens.

Review Structure

Ok, enough preamble (even though this whole post is preamble to an actual review). As I see it, there are three aspects to owning and playing a game:

Before you get it to the table

During your plays of it

After you are finished playing

Within each of these… let’s call them phases… are factors that make a game enjoyable or cumbersome, fun or a drag, good or bad. I want to take them one by one, because I build out my reviews based on these three phases.

Before: Accessible

Keywords: Cost | Availability | Setup time | Learning time | Space requirement | Time requirement | Responsible production

The main consideration is how easy it is to get the game to the table. This begins with the cost and availability of the game. A $25 game with quick and flat-rate shipping is much more accessible than a $150 behemoth with overseas shipping on top of it. Set up time, space, and play time are also important considerations for the accessibility of a game.

None of these are absolute measures, otherwise the cheap, simple, and quick games would automatically be the best. An obvious caveat is that if you are seeking a more complex or lengthy game experience you are naturally willing to invest more time, money, and space in your house to play it. 

I also consider the reputation, values, and business practices of the production company when evaluating a game, insofar as I can determine them. This shows up in marketing and the track record of the company when it comes to supporting the life of the game through errata, online resources, and reprints. Is the game overstuffed with plastic? Although board gaming is a niche hobby, we still should be concerned with wastefulness and we really should be thinking twice about a company that throws a lot of flashy minis at me to get me to click buy or back.

During: Immersive

Keywords: Rules | Complexity | Sensory components | Manageable decision space | Captures essence of theme, mechanic, or challenge

Once the game is on your table, does it hold your attention and imagination? Does it overtax and burn your brain? Are you constantly breaking away from playing the game to reference the rulebook?

Immersion is hard to define. Chess, a themeless abstract game, can be just as immersive as Spirit Island. Clever Cubed engrosses me just as much as Nemo’s War. A definition I heard of games is “the voluntary adoption of arbitrary restrictions in order to experience overcoming those restrictions”. Take basketball as an example. Why should players have to dribble the ball? Running and carrying it, like in football, seems like a far more efficient way to bring it up the court. Dribbling is an arbitrary restriction that players agree to in order to overcome the challenge of dribbling successfully.

When it comes to board games, I think of immersion as the ease by which I enter, inhabit, and interact with the “world” or “arbitrary restrictions” or “rules” of that game. In chess, you don’t have to consult the rulebook to remember how knights or bishops move. You know and accept those movement rules and easily inhabit the chessboard, developing your strategy to hem in the opponent’s pieces. 

Many factors go into developing an immersive game experience but I focus on a holistic handful. Rules referencing during play is a big one. Occasional consultations are fine, but too much is an immersion-killer. The complexity of a game is important as well, though not a standalone measure. A simple game can be boring and a complex game can be unapproachable. Complexity has a lot of interplay with the decision space the game puts you in and whether it is manageable. What choices do you make throughout the game and how much information do you need to process to make them? If you need to grok 25 different future game states in order to play well and have fun, that’s a lot to ask. That game might be too complex. Conversely if you are making a lot of micro decisions and it’s really hard to see how they tie together, that game might be too simple or vague.

The sensory experience of a game is really important. Only two of our 5 senses are really active in board games, sight and touch. We don’t really taste, hear, or smell our boardgames but we certainly see and touch them. Is the artwork appealing? Do the components feel good and easy to manipulate? These are vital determinants of whether I get immersed in a game.

Last, but perhaps most important, is whether the game manages to capture and communicate the essence of its theme, core mechanics, or challenge it poses the players. Immersion requires creating a cohesive artificial world. If the game is not clear about what it is, then gameplay starts to fall apart. Imagine if in checkers your pieces had different abilities depending on the pattern of opponent pieces around them or the row they occupied. It is no longer an abstract game and now takes on some weird additional tactical layers. The decision space balloons and complexifies. You have to check the rulebook to figure out what you and your opponents can do. A game that plays in 10 minutes now takes 1 hour.

Mage Knight is a game that “knows what it is”. Mage Knight is an adventure game driven by a somewhat predictable timer. It is not an open world adventure game. Everything is built around exploring to build your power while keeping pace with the dummy player. Terrain presents obstacles and opportunities to keep pace. Opponent abilities give you wounds which slow you down and knock you off pace. 

I might be in the minority, but I think Too Many Bones is a game that does not quite “know what it is”. Is it an adventure/story game or a tactical battler? The core of the game is the battle grid and gearloc progression, with adventure on top. It’s like Chip Theory Games wanted to create an alternative to Hoplomachus, but instead of squad-based tactics in a larger arena they shifted the focus to deeper character development in a tighter tactical space. But I found the battle grid so spatially restrictive that it forced me to ignore branches of the character progression tree and the adventure component was underwhelming. All the keywords and exceptions to figure out how to implement made my plays of this game disintegrate into a frustrating mess.

After: Compelling

Keywords: Memorable, Fun, Rewarding

This part of gaming is the most elusive to define and best discussed in personal terms. How did the game hook you? How did it ask you to think? What did it make you feel? Your answers to those questions will determine whether it stays on your top shelf or slowly gets shuffled off into the corner before finally getting marked “For Trade” on BGG.

Compelling games are worth playing again for whatever reason you found them compelling. Perhaps it was just a wild ride you want to go on again. That’s why I keep Mage Knight. I want to relive those early turns of building a strategy and the later tense turns of reaching for the full potential of my deck and units. Finding out my score is wholly uninteresting to me.

Or perhaps a game sticks with you because it’s hard and you can’t quite see how to win, but you want to keep trying. Underwater Cities has been like that for me. My first few plays were god awful defeats. Even though I grasped the rules, I had no idea what I was doing or how to think strategically about the game. I still can’t beat any missions in After the Virus except the prologue…

Or you feel a satisfying sense of progression and accomplishment. Or you feel relaxed. Or you enjoy the imaginative escape. There are so many possible reasons, all very personal, as to why a game might hook you.

Looking Ahead

So there you have it, this is how I will try to write reviews on this site. I expect they’ll be a bit longer and a bit more personal than reviews you may find elsewhere. I hope you enjoy!