Magnastorm

EvEvanstar6,0

This is a very unusual majorities game. It's a race to get to 27 points. Actions are taken by moving a meeple from a top board to a space on the bottom board. Your actions are either collect the action cubes pictured at the end of the row you placed into, or pay action cubes equal to the cost of the cubes pictured at the end of the row you placed into, to move your little robot mini one space on the central board and you can then drop a "turtle" building on an open colored dot. The colored dot comes with a step on the matching colored track. Many of the action spaces come with extra bonuses, and so do many of the track steps. The game has special ability cards that can be purchased by spending cubes equal to and in the colors of the meeples at the top of the board, so there's an interesting tension as to when to take a board action and when to buy a card as the cards get cheaper and cheaper with player's actions. Once the meeples are totally gone, that card is no longer available to be taken in that round, and taking the card dumps the meeples below it to the bottom board, which can also mess up the even-ness of the number of turns available each round. Even more interesting, every game there are four special VP conditions, which start at 5 for the first players to get them done. All these victory conditions require the player to hurt either their track position, or their board positions to complete. Additionally, at the end of the round, the player with the most buildings in each of the regions of the board gets 1vp, and then there's a cube payout for first to third places, with the players in third getting the most cubes. The game is full of these tensions forcing you to plan where you want to focus. Even more troublesome, only three board areas score at the end of each of the four rounds, and the scoring tile rotates one spoke of the board at the end of each round. The game has a few awkward qwirks. When you gain a special ability card you get 2vp, but if you manage to steal one away from another player, that player loses 1vp, so you often have to do this +2/-1 calculation which makes sense but feels sloppy. Additionally, some of the bonuses in the action spaces only work when you take a board action, others only work when you take a collection action, others work in either case. There's no indication of this in the icons, so that's a little troublesome to remember. Overall, it's a solid twist on the worker placement genre that's pretty quick playing and worthy of attention. ☆ 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

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