Board Game Review

Here is a game ranked #67 on BoardGameGeek, rated 8.07 by more than 18,000 players, sitting in the top 50 for both thematic and strategy game rankings. The solo mode is rated “Recommended” or “Best” by two out of three voters. Reviews describe it in terms usually reserved for the hobby’s elite - elegant, thematic, deeply replayable, one of the best deckbuilders ever designed. And yet, bring it up at a board game night and watch people blink. ...

Your first game of The Castles of Burgundy probably felt like this: you stared at a player board covered in coloured hexes and tiny symbols you couldn’t read without squinting, someone spent ten minutes explaining what silvers do, you placed tiles in the wrong regions twice, you lost track of what your dice were even supposed to accomplish, and when scoring came around, someone had quietly built an enormous ship empire while you were busy decoding the iconography. ...

The argument about Terraforming Mars solo tends to split along predictable lines. One camp says it’s a stripped-down, meditative puzzle - the cleanest version of the game, free from politics and table aggression. The other says the multiplayer interaction is the game, and solo is an empty engine-building exercise you could replace with a spreadsheet. Both camps are partially right. Which one describes your experience depends almost entirely on why you liked Terraforming Mars in the first place. ...