AuZtralia

BaBalleflassstar6,5

Swingy. Low interaction. Cool theme and nice components (KS edition). I was mostly disappointed by that you mostly get resources by taking them from the map and that your buildings only get you 1 gold on completion. The combat is ok, but swingy and gets samey in the long run as bad draws will ruin your economy and VP scoring.

EvEvanstar4,6

This is another really cool Wallace game that has some great ideas, but ultimately misses it's mark in terms of the endgame. Essentially, the game is run on a time-track, where you have a board of different actions you can take, each costing a different amount of time points. The next player to take an action is the player who spent the least time so far. Generally you are building a little rail network, and placing farm tiles which are worth points at the end of the game. To do this, you have to collect resources from a depleting supply on the board. At the midpoint of the game, a new player enters in the form of an AI monster player. The monster marker starts to reveal and control monster tiles, which come and try to eat your farms away, so they score for the game instead of the constructing player. You can prevent this by picking fights with the tokens before they activate, and killing the monster tiles produces some number of points. Generally, I love the balance of needing to farm vs the need to build up your military. The monsters also rest in numbered spaces so you can see what their order of activation will be and plan accordingly. The combat system is a little wonky. You flip cards that have a little chart of which types of units deal damage with each flip. In each battle you have a little budget of sanity tokens, where if you run out you lose the fight. This serves to put a bit of a hard limit on the push your luck element of the game. This brings me to the disappointing element of the game. If a player is eliminated by either a monster devouring their home base, or by this sanity token metric, the game just ends, and then most points at that moment wins. This leads to some anti-climatic abrupt ends, particularly when you've time-budgeted out your next few actions. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

MeMestremutenstar6,0

Rating: 3/5 Production value: 3/4 Is the game in my collection/Love to have?: 0/1