Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Maglev Metro

Game: Maglev Metro

Publisher: Bezier Games

Designer:  Ted Alspach

Year: 2021

Maglev Metro is a game from the same designer and publisher as Suburbia and The Castles of Mad King Ludwig - two games that share quite a bit of DNA. Maglev Metro is something completely different, combining pick up and deliver with engine building, in a pretty familiar setting of a railway or metro network. The setting does try to stand out from the crowd by injecting a futuristic theme, but aside from the components, we certainly didn't feel any thematic elements brought about by the setting. Your train is a striking plastic piece with metal trim, to denote a train capable of magnetic levitation, and it's robots (bronze, silver and gold meeples) who are key to the early phase of the game before your network starts to attract actual people. 

Maglev Metro uses a triple (!) layer player board to invite you to build a metro system in either New York or Berlin, and players use transparent hexagon tiles to build tracks around the city. The transparent tiles can be layered to create a pretty accurate representation of how many city metros have lots of interlinking and overlapping routes. The game certainly has a striking look on the table and its mix of mechanics are two favourites of ours, so Maglev Metro holds a lot of promise.

I'm flying high, defying gravity:- Maglev Metro

Game: Maglev Metro

Publisher: Bezier Games

Designer:  Ted Alspach

Year: 2021

Maglev Metro is a 1-4 player pick up and deliver game which sees you setting up metro stations either across Berlin or Manhattan. This new state of the art Magnetic Levitation (Maglev for short) system offers next to no friction allowing for fast, easy transit of passengers. So long as you can build all the lines, stations, and fix all the technical hurdles involved. Starting with a small team of robots that can be assigned as you want, you'll spend actions in order to locate, collect and drop off robots to the correctly coloured station. Doing so lets you put the robots on your player board, increasing the efficiency of your actions and ultimately letting you transport people. As cool as a train system for robots would be, your system is meant to take people, so these are where you'll get the majority of your points. 

 

The map starts nearly empty, with only a copper, silver and gold station to begin the game. Each station will have a couple of robots on it. On your turn you'll take two actions from the list of options in the centre of the board. Most of the actions are self explanatory, track lets you place new track tiles or remove existing ones, move lets you move along track to the next station, capacity is how many people you can carry, while pick up is how many you can collect from the station you are at for one action, build stations lets you add new stations to the map and reverse train lets you switch directions without reaching the end of the line. This leaves a couple of more complex actions: Drop off is used to deliver passengers to the station you are currently on. If they are the matching colour then they are placed on your board on a matching colour slot. Refill station lets you pull passengers out of the bag to the station you are on. Adjust is perhaps the most unique of all, letting you take robots off of your player board and then reassign them, letting you tweak your engine for the current requirements.

The Game Shelf Reviews:- Mandala Stones

Game: Mandala Stones

Publisher: Board&Dice

Designer: Filip Głowacz

Year: 2021

 

 

If you attend board game conventions, then you'd perhaps recognise Filip Głowacz as the co-owner of board game publisher Board&Dice, wearing a flashy Pac-Man themed suit. Mandala Stones is his first published board game design, and we were fortunate to try out a digital version late last year and immediately fell in love with it. The physical version makes itself even easier to love with its fantastic, colourful heavy plastic pieces which remind me of the pieces in Azul.

Mandala Stones is an abstract game for 2-4 players in which you will collect towers of colourful stones to optimise your scoring opportunities. It has lots of puzzliness and an every changing game-state that both looks fantastic and keeps you constantly engaged in the changing opportunities on the board. It's one we have been really excitd to share our thoughts on.

Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Overboss: A Boss Monster Adventure

Game: Overboss: A Boss Monster Adventure

Publisher: Brotherwise Games

Designer:  Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ

Year: 2021

Boss Monster is one of the earliest games I remember playing when I was introduced to board gaming. Amy's friends were not board gamers at the time, but they were geeks and video gamers who were dipping their toes into the hobby. Boss Monster is exactly the sort of game, alongside Munchkin and Catan, that university students with a geeky disposition were playing 10 years ago. It's not a game I ever really revisited, finding it too be a bit basic, but it certainly has an audience, is perfect for comic store shelves and has spawned many expansions.

Overboss takes that same theme and 8-bit artwork, but applies it to a tile-laying game, co-designed by Kevin Russ who designed the fabulous Calico - a truly special puzzly tile-laying game. With those credentials, we had to take a look at what twist on tile-laying Overboss has to offer

Where was that secret wall?:- Overboss: A Boss Monster Adventure

Game: Overboss: A Boss Monster Adventure

Publisher: Brotherwise Games

Designer:  Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ

Year: 2021

Overboss is a 1-5 player tile laying game set in the world of Boss Monster. Playing as one of the titular boss monsters, you have finished designing your dungeon and now it's time to create a dangerous overworld to defeat all but the most valiant heroes. You don't want to spend time and effort resetting your traps after 'Steve the Farmer' wanders in afterall! To do this you'll be drafting tiles and monsters from a common market and using those to create an overwold. Each landscape type scores differently, creating a unique puzzle every game.

Each player starts the game with a 3x4 board (4x4 in the advanced game) and optionally a choice of two Boss Monsters to play as. Five terrain types will be selected for the game, and all tiles of those types are gathered and shuffled before four tiles are dealt out into a market. The associated monsters are then put into a bag and four monsters are drawn, one paired with each tile. On a player's turn they simply take a tile and the associated monster and place it anywhere on their board. The monster must be placed on the empty space in the middle of the placed tile with a couple of exceptions. The game will continue like this until everyone's boards are full.

The Game Shelf Reviews:- Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn

Game: Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn

Publisher: Plaid Hat Games

Designer: Isaac Vega

Year: 2021

 

Ashes Reborn is a re-release of Plaid Hat's successful two-player customisable dueling card game, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. The reprint is described as version 1.5, with not significant changes from the original game, but some improvements to the wording and balance of the cards. If you've never played Ashes before, then this would be your entry point, or you could use the 1.5 Upgrade Pack to upgrade your original copy.

 

If you want to dive deep into the game, then a huge number of expansions are on the horizon with a new phoenixborn character in each pack. Plaid Hat Games are even running a direct subscription service, but frankly, there is a huge amount of content in just this base game box, with the six phoenixborns allowing you to play 15 different combinations with the preset decks, plus the option to deckbuild, making the variety pretty endless!

Keep Droning On:- Cryo

Game: Cryo

Publisher: Z-Man Games

Designer: Tom Jolly, Luke Laurie

Year: 2021

 

 

 

Cryo is a 2-4 player worker placement game that tasks you as a survivor of a ship that has crashed on a strange, and cold, planet. In the last moments about your great starship the resident population split into factions and began infighting. Now you find yourself in control of the drone bay, desperate to preserve what human life you can save, so long as you know you can trust them! You'll send drones out across the planet's frozen surface in order to gather supplies, rescue your crew and construct transportation that can carry the humans safely underground before the cold night makes the planets surface entirely inhabitable.