I was playing Metazooa recently – a taxonomy game – and excited about the different species at our bird feeder, and I figured, “There has to be a bird identification game out there, right?” And, shock of shocks, there is that!
Birdle is, as the name would imply, Wordle-esque, in that there’s a daily target and six guesses for the user, with indicators for partial success. Of course, Birdle has slightly different objectives than Wordle, being an identification game – that is to say, each daily bird comes with photos of it and possibly a range map. Your goal is to guess its name – its common name – with a dropdown to help, so if you type in “yellow” it will offer you every bird with “yellow” in its name, applicable to that area.
Area-applicable is, of course, only important because of another feature – not only is there a bird-of-the-day for the world, but there are also birds for each of the continents! Excepting Antarctica, because Antarctica, but including Central America and, as a treat, the contiguous US. I have a guess as to where most of their user base is.
Once you’ve guessed, the screen will display that bird’s order, family, genus, and species, grey for wrong and green for the ones that you’ve gotten correct. For some birds this is more useful than others – songbirds are now the bane of my existence, even though I love them and they’re adorable – but in all cases, after your third guess, it will offer to tell you what the correct family is, and then after the next guess the genus, and after guess five it will offer you the first three letters of the bird’s common name. Depending on how expansive the genus is – and whether or not you’re using Wikipedia – this can still leave some room for error, but its clear that the true objective is for you to learn. And check out some gorgeous bird photography. And if nine birds-of-the-day aren’t for either of those enough, there’s also a practice function, where you can plug in geography and/or family of birds and get photos with multiple choice!
The pictures are from eBird and the range maps are from Birds of the World, both of which are comprehensive. And the game aspect adds a certain motive-to-process, as it were. Why else would I remember that some ducks are called pintails? (And why are some hummingbirds called hermits?)
This game is pretty. That was the first thing I noticed, once a friend convinced me to play. The art is colorful and softly lit, the music is light and often ‘peppy meditative’… and there’s a friendly metalbending tiger.
Okay, to be clear – my characterization of Mu Hu as friendly is based on the artwork. If you have the misfortune of opposing the tiger, it might not hold. Also to be fair, as a member of the Five Elements Alliance, Mu Hu can technically make use of any of them – metal and earth are just in line with his character bonus.
The way it works is this: each character belongs to a Sect, which has a base card pool they’re working with, and throughout the game the player will also unlock the character’s unique special options. A little bit like Hearthstone Battlegrounds, Yi Xian is a game of eight players, each prepping their own build, cycling through one-on-one fights until they run out of health. (Or rather, Destiny.) Also like Hearthstone Battlegrounds, your build is determined before you enter combat.
There are, in total, eight card slots in your deck. The game starts with three unlocked and progresses, so as not to overwhelm, and you’ll draw cards to work with each turn, which you can add to your build, hold on to, exchange (discard, draw a new one to replace it) or absorb (I call this “eating” it – it’s one way to level up). You can also stack two Level One versions of the same card to make a Level Two, and two Two’s to make a Three, with improving bonuses.
And then, build in place and timer running down, you fight! And hope that your build scales faster than your opponent’s. You can check in on what they’re working with, if you have time to spare, but you only ever get to see what they had in play last turn – not what they’re changing about it now.
Basics in place, there’s the matter of Sect and character complications: the Cloud Spirit Sword Sect are very stabby, and generally straightforward to use, while the Heptastar Pavilion – reliant on probability manipulation and building around fixed spaces in the deck – are a little bit harder. Mu Hu is consistently well-paired with earth and metal cards, while one of his Five Elements comrades, Du Lingyuan, starts with a randomized preferred element each game and benefits from jumping between multiples, which need be carefully sequenced. My favorite card in the game by name and by artwork is “Giant Whale Spirit Sword.” I have no idea how to explain why this makes sense, except that it… does.
And then the characters have Side Jobs, a whole ‘nother card pool which can give you magic flowers or poison music depending on what you choose. And then, if you’re of a high enough experience level (or playing with a friend who is) there’s also the Season event chaos. And yet somehow it’s all cohesive and well-balanced! And, again, so beautiful. I might go play Mu Hu again.
These are the itty-bittiest dinosaurs you’ve ever held in hand. Lying them down and standing them up again on the boards is a minor dexterity exercise. And they’re so cute. You’ve got stegosaurus, brachiosaurus… allosaurus, velociraptors… the purple ones… I’m getting ahead of myself.
Inside of this very compact box is a sprawling board of actions, Ranches, player mats, research and contract centers, and the desperately important Medical Leave, whose board also houses the round tracker, a phase guide, and end-game scoring on the back. Each player’s Ranch is unique in arrangement and therefore where Barriers need to go to stop dinos from escaping, where your freebie enclosure starts, and which resources are where! Resources become more difficult to acquire the more dinos you need to provide for with them, as you use land to house stegos instead of to grow food. Luckily, you can also gain resources during the Assign Ranchers phase, which is also where you get Barriers, Research benefits, Contract fulfillment, and dinos.
Dino-wrangling is, to nobody’s surprise, incredibly dangerous, and often results in injury. You can shill out Supplies for someone to do that for you, of course, but that gets expensive, so your other option is to pick a dino and roll the Wrangler die. Most of the time, nothing happens. You net the critter without incident, move it to your Holding Area and move on. Sometimes, there’s an incident, and both your Ranger and the dino are wounded and sent to Medical Leave – you still get to keep ’em, but any plans that depended on them being where you’d expected are shot. And sometimes, very occasionally, there’s a different kind of incident, and you wind up with a second dino. This sounds fantastic and I was absolutely delighted when it happened to me… until I realized I had neither the Barriers nor the food for it. Extra dinos are not always a good thing. And being wounded isn’t always so bad! I had for myself a plenty functional build in which being wounded got me a bonus action and wound up rather disappointed when wrangling went without fanfare.
All your ranger actions handled and all your stuff now being yours, you now move on to arranging your Ranch, dealing with runaway dinos, feeding your dinos, dealing with more runaway dinos, and breeding your dinos, at which point there are – you guessed it – more runaway dinos. Now, to be fair, you will not necessarily be dealing with them three separate times, so much as the possibility of them three separate times, depending on what you don’t have enclosures for before breeding them, what you don’t have enclosures for after breeding them, and what you can’t afford to feed. Even the gentlest of herbivores will crash through your Barriers rather than starve to death, which is what the escaping ones do, and jailbreaking carnivores will eat your other dinos instead. (They can, however, eat your other escaping dinos, if that tidies up some problems.) So there is a strong incentive to be sure you can maintain what you’re acquiring, certainly.
There are two other problems, if problems they are, to do with opportunities and the challenges thereof. The first is Contracts, which are both a primary way of earning points and the most difficult one. Seven spare dinos, anybody? A Public Contract only takes three, but your Private Contract needs four, and can only be fulfilled when a Public Contract is also. Talk about steep terms. Especially because, unless you spend a Supply and an action, there’s no way to acquire a dino and sell it in the same round! And, as previously established, feeding them gets expensive. The ones worth more points in both Contracts and on their own are, naturally, the ones that need to eat more. And then there are the purple ones.
“The purple ones,” for which every little figure is unique, are products of the Research division and each come with their own special effects, food requirements, and more lenient habitation rules. They’re hand-raised and unlikely to run off on you, more or less. An excellent example is Gallimimus, an omnivore requiring either one Plant or one Meat, which lets you pick an adjacent dino that does not need to be fed. If that dinosaur is, say, Tyrannosaurus Rex, which needs three Meat in a round (or even just Allosaurus, which needs two), you definitely see returns. Also, Gallimimus is worth two victory points at game’s end, so there’s that too. The non-animal Research cards, like the Mobile Barriers (allowed to be rearranged), also have point values attached.
All in all, this one is very mechanics-crunchy, needs a lot of space for gameplay and very little for storage, and, again, has tiny little dinosaurs you get to profile-match to their pictures and zookeep in a format where they don’t bite. And then you get to sell them to the Jurassic Parks of the world, and they’re no longer your problem! Flawless. Replayable ad infinitum. Have at least one player with steady hands and decent eyesight.
Hex Effects: Or, Side Effects of the Amateur Alchemists. Officially. Or, unofficially, When Family Rivalries Can Only Be Settled By Giving Your Relative an Evil Alter Ego! Amongst other miserable maladies.
Hex Effects is a game which you start afflicted, and spend trying to treat your own Hexes. As you do, though, each Remedy will leave you susceptible to other Hexes, which the other players will so ungraciously give you, while also triggering your untreated Hexes with Disasters to garner an effect. There really is no winning, is there? Only there is, because it’s a card game! The first person to treat all their Hexes wins. Take that, meddling relatives!
This one is relatively simple for something that goes back and forth so much. There are a few other ways to mess with other players and/or benefit yourself – usually ‘and,’ they’re very much joint concepts – and precious few things to keep track of that aren’t directly in front of you, rendering it rather easy to pick up! While also being a “plan six steps ahead, if you wish” (“…and if the deck favors you”) kind of options-transparent. The design is similarly details-rich combined with easy-to-parse!
(My favorite such detail at the moment is the tagline on the Remedy for Sinister Spores, Eau d’Acide No 7, which merely reads: “Sacré burn!”)
This one is bittersweet, because I knew the game was being discontinued by the time that I acquired it. I recently came into a secondhand Nintendo Switch, and seeing that it was slated to be discontinued, the first of their free games that I tried was Star Wars: Hunters. That way, if I liked it, I’d have as long as possible!
Folks, I liked it. I adored it. I wish I’d written about it sooner, so those of you interested would have had as long as well, and it’s taken me a while to put it into words. Truth be told, I’m still a little short for words, and that’s ok.
Star Wars: Hunters is a no-hard-feelings 4v4 brawl/bloodbath with Star Wars-style characters, each new and with their own lore. And their own weapons! Lightsabers, flamethrowers, poison arrows… there are no holds barred. And! Rest assured your opponents (and your friends) will respawn when eliminated, no harm done. Except to their objectives.
Hunters has, by and large, three game modes. “Eliminate opponents” (possibly with extra steps), “hold location” (possibly with extra locations to control), and “hold object” (and possibly do something with it). One of the latter, and one of my personal favorites, is a cycling special event called Huttball, which is basically like if soccer or American football were characterized by ziplines, fire hazards, and also The Power of Unspeakable Violence. What a delight! Another special event takes the usual “eliminate opponents” game mode, Squad Brawl (won by the first team to reach 20, 25, or 30 eliminations in all), and makes every single character the Wookie, with an Ultimate Ability recharge that’s absurd. The entire battle is eight Wookies yelling and hurling boulders at each other. It’s called Boulder Bash.
I could go on for hours, but truly, I cannot say enough good things about this game. Whether you like tanks, healers, snipers, or squishy melees, there’s a solid handful of characters for you, each with their own distinct gimmicks, power sets, and catchphrases. If you don’t like one healer, there’s a good chance you’ll think better of another! If you’re not a fan of straight-up PvP mode, perhaps controlling objectives is more your speed. And the implication, underneath it all, that they’re all friends and/or coworkers, to me makes the whole thing all the more sweet. I love this game.
Ecosystem: Coral Reef is a closed-circuit deck-passing game, by which players use the dwindling supply of available cards to build a 5 by 4 grid of marine life! Everyone will wind up with their own completed ecosystem, but the particulars will grow harder and harder to orchestrate, leading to some… very strange placement. Coral floating at the surface, anyone?
Instead of having each organism’s effects on the cards, each player gets a cheat sheet, which will lead to a lot of cross-referencing in the early stages of the game. Each life form has a different bonus, most of them points-based, many of them in relation to the organisms they share rows, columns, or adjacency with. A couple of them have actions, like the octopus, who lets you move another card! Very important, as once cards are placed you can’t move them anymore. And sometimes you thought you knew what you were doing, and then your neighbor handed you a shark. Y’know, a normal problem.
Regardless, this one was a lot of fun, with point-stacking mechanics everywhere and an additional bonus for your least points-yielding type, be they producers, prey, or predators – which, being based off the point total of that variety and not merely the number of organisms, can be a hell of a bonus! This is definitely a ‘write down your math’ kind of game. And isn’t it gorgeous?
I finally played shuffleboard! We were staying out of town to visit some of our relatives, and the place we were staying had shuffleboard in the lobby. So, naturally, I insisted on playing a game.
I’ve never paid a lot of thought to shuffleboard. It was, naturally, a game that involved shuffling something, across a board, and I had the general aesthetic of it from watching GMM – Good Mythical Morning, for the unfamiliar, have done a guessing game version where they’re guessing, say, 100 Years of Party Snacks, and the shuffleboard sections are decades. Getting the concept right, then getting the shuffleboard part right, are two separate steps, and a massive production with sticks to push pucks a la very-confused-pool-cues. So I had never actually seen it table-sized.
Shuffleboard, it turns out, is really simple! Covered in sand, which I had never noticed, and about the size of an air hockey table, which I had never thought about, and a game of control-of-movement that can be played as Munchkin-ly or friendly as you like. That is to say, you can play it as friendly as you like – no promises about your friends!
To start, one player will take a puck (I don’t know if that’s what they’re called, but each player has four, and players alternate) and shoot it from one end of the board towards the other – again, much like air hockey. The board is separated into two halves, with a moat around the outside; push too hard, and you’ll go off entirely, but the further along you get without falling, the more points you’ll score! Playing bumper cars with other people’s pieces is valid and encouraged, at least in the resources I’ve seen. (Shh. GMM is a perfectly valid source.) It can also backfire tremendously, as your pieces and theirs veer off in unforeseen directions! Once all the pucks are in play, the person with the puck furthest along scores for each puck before the first of their opponent’s. After that, nada, and only the person who has that furthest scores. But! They also have to go first next time, giving the other person the bumper car advantage.
This was a delightful little skill challenge, physics experiment, and time-killer pre-airport on our day of checkout. I look forward to many more games of shuffleboard somewhere in my distant future! Especially with people who play Munchkin. Swoosh! Plink. Clatter.
(Translation: both pucks went zooming right off the board!)
Because what everyone has been desperately waiting for the opportunity to do is rifle through the trash and eat it, right? No? Ah, well, it makes more sense for a raccoon. In Trash Pandas, you have two objectives: succeed in the press-your-luck dice part of the game, which earns you the right to gain and stash cards, and then play and stash cards to have the most points at the end of the game. The card and dice mechanics dance together well!
In a lot of ways, the card mechanics are also a press-your-luck vibe, because cards you stash are scored by who has the most of a kind, and stashed cards are usually secret! Do you use the card for its ability or its point value? Can you afford to expend it? Is it worth the risk?
Of course, some cards have no point value. You’re unlikely to stash/eat the Kittehs and Doggos, because their only purpose is to block attempts to steal from you! And Blammos are a flat one point each, but they also let you re-roll your last die. Decisions, decisions.
Mechanics aside, this one really leans into the garbage theme! Ew, you say. Hilarious, I’d contend. The Nanners have mushrooms growing on them. The “Mmm Pie!” has a D6. All of it looks like a biohazard and a half. The artist(s) must’ve had a blast!
I’m honestly very tempted to make wine. I’m not interested in drinking it, and I think making it could be fun. And then I’d gift the bottles to Mom, who actually would drink it! Flawless system. In La Viña, the “gift” is actually the vineyard – shocking for anyone who speaks Spanish, I know – and should come with an asterisk: you and your fellow players all might inherit this vineyard, but to prevent fragmentation, only one of you gets to! So you have to prove yourself as grape- and wine-savvy to win the prize.
The general premise is that you’re moving through the vineyard, collecting grapes, and each time you exit the vineyard you can sell them to wineries – some wineries want blends, which are at least half one variety of grapes, and others want one type exclusively. Grapes have values, wineries have minimums, and you can only make deliveries with one basket at a time, which can only hold so many grapes. It’s a juggling act! Grapes sold, you get prestige, which is both currency and victory condition!
The game ends when someone has used all their barrel tokens, given to wineries each time you make a sale, and everyone else gets to finish their last pass of the vineyard. Barrels vary by number of players, as do a lot of things – basket upgrades for purchase, tools to be found, even the length of the vineyard! Which determines the amount of available grapes on a given pass, while the tools (picked up with some grapes) give you better access to cards that might be inconveniently placed. All of which makes for a very carefully weighted vine-to-wine experience!
Have you ever read Shel Silverstein’s “How Not To Have To Dry The Dishes”? It goes about how you’d expect. I remember encountering it during our fourth grade class poetry show, at just the right age to both empathize with the “consent of the governed” of it, and have a vague crisis of conscience. After all, the story goes, to not have to dry the dishes, something has to break.
I was also nine for this story, and had yet to encounter the notion that dishes could be fixed.
All of which is to say that Broken and Beautiful is a game about kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. Or silver, or platinum, but notably something shiny and obvious, marking breakage as a part of something’s story, and not the end of the bloody world.
In terms of the game, it’s gorgeously simple: get pottery! Break pottery! Fix pottery, at a cost. When you’re done collecting, score! It’s what I’m inclined to call “mechanically compact” – nearly every feature serves multiple purposes. Your candidate cards to choose from, on a given turn, are a quantity of (two per player) plus one, giving you extra options and, per the one left over, defining what type of dishes this turn are going to break. If the last card available is a cup, everyone’s cups shatter! Each different card type has a given cost to fix, which is also the gold you can sell it for when you first acquire it – no deciding later that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And given that broken items are worthless, come the end of the game, you may want to! When an item is fixed, however, it’s not only untouchable – it will never break again – it’s worth more points than it was unbroken! (It puts me in the mind of wood glue, something else that feels like poetry and isn’t quite the point. I’ll drop the link.) Flip the card over, and bask in the improvements.
‘But Cassandra,’ you might ask, ‘if the back of the card is largely identical to the front, how does the deck work?’ It’s easy! The top card’s not a secret. In fact, that top card type will also break each turn, regardless of what you do. You see what I mean? Efficient.
When there are no longer enough cards left for a proper draft, the game ends, and each type of item is scored differently. Some have different stacking bonuses with others of their type; cups’ scores are multiplied when paired with saucers; teapots gain value by what else is of the same pattern/set. And then there’s serving trays and storage boxes, wooden items that cannot break, one of which scores a flat rate and the other per your remaining gold ingots! You can see, then, why I’ve never been able to predict which of us will win a game until we stop to score. With nine distinct scoring methods – who on Earth can?
