Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 27)

A while back I had a rant about the casual misogyny found in rule books in relation to using he/him (not examples, but in the actual rules and card effects) and how that creates feelings of exclusion for women in our hobby. Thankfully it’s getting better but I’ve recently watched a number of rules videos where the rules presenters kept referring to meeples as he/him. Eg “You place your meeple here and he gives you …”. Urgh. Really? Yet another drop of exclusion in our lives. Add it to the list.

This wasn’t just one video. It was three different games over 2 days. The first I let slide. The second was what, again? Third, hmm, this is really bugging me now. I mean, you’re casually watching, eager and excited to learn a new game, and then you get the “he”. It’s so easy to say “You place your meeple here and it gives you …” or any other of 20 variants. The presenter can then feel good about being inclusive and won’t it be nice that women don’t have to suffer urghs, eye-rolls and turn-offs as they watch.

New-to-me games played recently include …

COFFEE RUSH (2023): Rank 1478, Rating 7.1

Move your meeple around the grid to collect resources from each space it lands on. Use them to complete your personal contracts which are randomly dealt to you and become penalties if you don’t complete them in 4 turns. Even with upgrades to get you more resources, it’s like Tetris, just this sense of impending doom as the contracts come faster and faster and you start doing triage to work out what to let go. The play itself is repetitive – work out what’s the best route for your meeple to take this turn to get the needed-right-now resources to complete the contracts that are about to turn into penalties. Which is a nice mini-puzzle, but every turn is too repetitive.

Rating: 6

FINSPAN (2025): Rank 676, Rating 7.7

Simplified Wingspan. You still build cards onto action strips, and then you run the action strips to get new cards, generate eggs, or turn eggs into fish tokens, which you then move into groups of three to double their points. Six actions each round. No aggravating food mechanic – costs are discarding cards, eggs, or fish. Easier. No constant perusal of cards effects in the display – just draw, build what you get. Easier. And fast – you can almost play simultaneously but for effects that give everyone things. You still prioritise cards around end-round goals. It’s probably too simple for Wingspan die-hards but for those who prefer faster, easier, simpler, this is good.

Rating: 7

KOKESHI (2024): Rank 10045, Rating 7.1

You’ve got 5 personal action tracks to move your meeples up but the cool thing is that you build the actions on each track with tiles from the display. Actions may be to move up another meeple up, get another action tile, or move up one of the 4 scoring tracks. It provides a nice little optimisation challenge on how to build so you can consistently trigger lots of moves and actions. Do you concentrate on being fastest to build your tracks for points, or being in the lead on scoring tracks? Turns go pretty fast because you can plan while others play and it finishes in 30 mins or so – a nice timeframe that says, hmm, I wouldn’t mind trying that again sometime.

Rating: 7

LUZ (2024): Rank 4660, Rating 7.1

Trick-taker where, similar to Xylotar, your hand is sorted for you (but by number within colour this time) and faces away from you, with only the colours known to you. But you can see every other player’s hand. There’s a bunch of cards missing so unless all the cards of a colour are out, or you can see all the highs (or not), you’ll be guessing whether you’ll win or lose in that colour. Regardless, bid how many tricks you’ll win and play normal tricks. With 5 colours and only 10 tricks, off-suiting is rampant and your game is dramatically dependent on what people lead. And afterwards the points swing for success vs failure are so unfairly large that you’ll only play this for variety and some laughs at the extremes rather than with any serious intent.

Rating: 6

MYSTERY OF THE TEMPLES (2017): Rank 4557, Rating 6.5

Move around a circular action track, either collecting resources, converting them into the colours you want, or spending the required colour combinations at the temple spaces for points. The number of conversions from common crystals to rarer coloured resources is high so it’s quite hard to work out who’s going for what, who might beat you, what you should go for, if someone’s going to take that action spot you need. Add in the special powers and it gets even more random. Repetitive accumulation and spend, mixed with intermittent frustration. At least it was quickish at 20-30 mins.

Rating: 6

MARRAKESH (2022): Rank 371, Rating 8.1 – Feld

It’s tricky to summarise. There’s a ton of sub-systems, each of which you can trigger once (some twice) in each of the three rounds. Which makes it hard to specialise yet that’s exactly what you need to do, boosting selected sub-system powers by drafting cubes in the right colours. Focusing on different sub-systems provides the replay. The competition for the cubes you want/need provides the tension. The downside is it’s a big rules teach and a long play time for what’s a pretty abstract Euro. But anything that requires me to approach Euro strategic planning differently piques my interest and this certainly did that. I was engaged throughout. Rating: 8

PATHOGEN (2022): Rank 9493, Rating 7.5

2p asymmetric abstract, which is the best kind of abstract. You’re moving your 2 meeples around the grid using a funky movement system, dropping off poop on each spot visited along the way (and/or removing opponent’s poop), winning if you connect one side of the board to the other or piling up 4 different spots with 6 poop. What makes the game interesting are the movement restrictions (giving a Rosenkonig feel), trying to engineer it so your opponent can’t get to key spots. The other twist is that one meeple only uses white squares, the other only dark squares – multiple options makes deep look-ahead analysis difficult so I felt I was playing more for the now/next rather than too far down the line, which I enjoyed. Easy rules, difficult choices. Neat.

Rating: 7

VERDANT (2022): Rank 756, Rating 7.3 – Obligatory 3+ different designers warning

Draw cards from a common display to build a 5×3 personal grid, with room cards and plant cards in a checkerboard pattern, aiming to get as many symbol matches between adjacent cards as possible. Plant cards will score if you match enough ‘time of day’ symbols from room cards. Room cards will score if they’re next to same-coloured plants. You also pick up a token each time you draft a card which boosts matches. There’s a ton of other ways to score via token sets, goal cards, generalisation bonuses and so on, which requires you to be mindful. And look, mid-weight Euro, it’s all fine, downtime is reasonable, it’s a pleasant challenge to plan your grid out, continually perusing the display to see what fits, what might need to change, making the best of what’s available. But we’ve been here before as well – happy to play again but won’t push for it.

Rating: 7

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Mark Jackson: I’m with Alison on Marrakesh… I’m not usually a fan of Feld designs (except the decidedly non-Feldian Rum & Pirates) but Marrakesh slipped past my defenses. I’d suggest giving it a try, even if you’re not usually into point salad-y games.

Larry: That’s kind of disappointing to hear that non-inclusive language still finds its way into game videos. I assume it’s simply carelessness by the presenters, since, at least in my circle of friends, gender-free pronouns have become such a standard part of our everyday speech and writing. Hopefully, they’ll clean up their act, since I assume that no one wants to piss off potential customers.

I’ll add to the chorus of support for Marrakesh. Despite my Feld fandom, I didn’t think I’d like it, since it seemed like a bunch of independent sub-games, with no interesting central mechanic (like, for example, the wonderful Mancala mechanism in Trajan) to tie it all together. And yet, Feld made it work, forcing the players to specialize despite (as Alison mentions) making it hard for the players to do so. It is indeed fairly long, but that’s become fairly standard these days with heavier Euros. I love it and I’d really like to explore it some more.