Valletta

EvEvanstar4,6

This is a really cute euro deckbuilder where each turn you play three of the five cards in your hand and then draw back up to 5. You get new cards by playing the builder card and paying the cost of the matching house space in resources collected from having played your other cards. The game end triggers when one player builds their last house, at which point everyone reshuffles their discards into their decks one last time, and you play until everyone runs out of cards. I found this to be extremely satisfying. The first session I won by taking all of one type of resource production and just producing as much and as often as possible. In the second, my opponents were on to me, so I had to take a more diverse strategy but wound up losing by two to my opponent who had focused on the higher end point scoring buildings. The game plays in about an hour. I could see how the game might feel samey with multiple plays despite there being some variation as to which cards are in each session, but this is everything I like about thin deckbuilders and much of what I enjoy about resource management games mashed together. Definitely a keeper. :star: Art, Iconography and components functional :star: Clever or interesting mechanisms :star: Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players :nostar: Multiple plays stay interesting :star: Low or mitigatable luck elements :star::star::star::nostar::nostar: Raw enjoyment

PaPahnstar7,2

This one was good! It's a pretty engaging little deck builder that has you building/thinning your deck, only to try to bloat it up at the last minute (or at least it's a reasonable option). Took quite a while with 4 players, but I think that was mainly due to being a learning game. Hopefully future plays are a bit faster, because I really prefer higher player counts for basically every game ever. Definitely underappreciated. A couple simple twists on the standard deckbuilding concepts (5 card hand, only play 3 per turn & play through your deck after game end triggers) really make it memorable.