*THE GAME SHOPPER HAS MOVED!*
The new link for this article is:  http://gameshop.com.au/blog/thegameshopper/2012/08/09/the-new-campaigners/

Thanks for your patience.
~Moss

I like serial games, by which I mean games that have a connected arc across several playthroughs and not the games that come on the back of a corn flakes box (that joke works better when you say it aloud.)
Alas, consistency between playthroughs is not something that board games are set up for. It’s simply not part of the established industry. By the end of Settlers of Catan, you may control a burgeoning industrial nation undergoing a cultural renaissance, but the next time you sit down to play you’ll once again just be a silly little man in a lean-to rubbing two sheep together to stay warm. And this is how it needs to be. If one tyrant continued to rule over the other players solely on the strength of past victories, it wouldn’t be much better than the Olympics, now would it? (Ahah!) For the sake of preserving balance, most games need to reset.

Risky Enterprising
Now, rare as they are, there are a few games that do rail against this temporal loop in an attempt to keep consistency between playthroughs. Risk Legacy, also known as “Consumable Risk,” offers one
particularly bizarre take on long-scale gaming. During each game you permanently change the board with stickers and rip up rule cards that can never be used again based on your decisions. Since most gamers don’t like to destroy the components they just purchased, Risk is taking a real… chance, here. It’s likely that most people are going to laminate the stickers, saran-wrap the board, or do something similarly obsessive in order to avoid the whole “play me 15 times and then buy a new one” business model. Although having a Christmas gift that you can always ask your parents for does have its merits.

Homebrew Campaigning
Since games like Risk Legacy are so infrequent, most of my experience with ‘campaigning’ have been  handcrafted, like a fine artisanal bread. I had a group of friends who committed to an Arkham Horror campaign in which they kept the same characters between playthroughs and retained not just their accumulated gear from each game, but also their injuries, their shattered pelvises, stubbed toes, and rapidly progressing mental instabilities. I thought it was a commendable effort, since Arkham Horror is a scavenging game where you never really want to end it and lose the goodies you worked so hard for. The flaw with their plan is that they were playing Arkham Horror. At the end of each three hour session, every character is hobbling on two broken legs and entertaining a delusional fear of lemon trees. Bringing these shattered heroes back for one more round against the forces of darkness may be appealing and even a little moving, but when you want to set them up against the complete Lovecraftian pantheon it’s going to take more than a magic-Batman-leg-brace to keep them standing.

That hat is literally holding his head together at this point.

The problem with homebrew campaigning is that most games follow a method of power escalation that is aimed for one playthrough. Most games will leave you too powerful at the end to keep playing, and games like Arkham Horror balance that power creep with crippling disabilities that will severely hinder any later activity. My girlfriend and I once played a lengthy game of Ticket to Ride in which we each controlled two colours of train cars. By the end of the game we were just sitting there drawing train tickets since we had already encompassed the board and we wanted to see how many points we could blow through. When the deck ran out we just sort of called it.

Forbidden Island
But now, the Girl and I are playing a new type of campaign that doesn’t carry the same burdens as these previous examples. It’s safe from power creep because there’s nothing to carry over from previous playthroughs. It’s Forbidden Island, back for a second showing here on the Game Shopper, and it’s been keeping me entertained all week.
When Forbidden Island was released, there were a few minor differences between the German version and the English version (as there is with many games.) Namely, the German version contained a page of variant islands that could be set up in place of the traditional board. These variants are more conceptual and less balanced, which means that the challenge flies through the roof on a few of them (the biggest decision in the Atoll is when to flip the table and go watch Mythbusters instead of playing.) Forbidden Island already has a lot of replay value with the adjustable difficulty scale, the unique character types, and the randomly created board. But these extra islands transform that replay value into something greater: the opportunity for a super-nerdy story campaign.

The Girl and I have been doing the following:

- We are playing each island in order, starting with the Island of Shadows.

- We use new characters each time until we have used all six, at which point we reshuffle the roles and start again with new team combinations.

- If we ever lose a game, those characters have drowned and cannot participate in the rest of the campaign.

- If all the characters drown, then we just bring them all back to life as the plucky apprentices of the late experts and keep playing. But we feel very bad about ourselves, like someone who adopts the same breed of dog after their old one dies and gives it the same name.

It’s a campaign that doesn’t skew the balance, but does impose a glorious sense of tension onto each playthrough. Every time I draw the Explorer at the beginning of a game I cringe, because I love the Explorer so dearly and just can’t bear to lose him. Let the Diver be sacrificed to the fell gods of the sea, I proclaim, he loves it down there in the murky blackness! Just leave me my precious Explorer with his clever diagonal mechanics!

For anyone who is looking for a way to revitalize a game that has become stale, adding an overarching continuity between games is an interesting way to raise the stakes. Just be careful to avoid carrying too much over between runs. After all, nobody wants to face down Yog-Sothoth from a MEDIchair.

*THE GAME SHOPPER HAS MOVED!*
The new link for this article is:  http://gameshop.com.au/blog/thegameshopper/2012/07/25/review-forbidden-island/

Thanks for your patience.
~Moss

2-4 Players, Play Time 20-45 mins.

Cooperative gaming is a notion that many people are hesitant about at first glance. Indeed, when I proposed to my parents that we play a game where we all work together to win as a communal group, they must have thought I was one braid away from joining the drum circle that lives down by the beach. But working as a team to overcome a set challenge is actually quite a natural form of gaming. We do it in video games, we do it in roleplaying games, and we even do it in sports. So why do board games need to be head-to-head, territorial fight-for-dominance bloodbaths? There are a number of fantastic cooperative games out there in which the players rely on teamwork to triumph over the game itself, and one of my personal favourites is Forbidden Island.

A Game of Survival

Forbidden Island, which in fact has nothing to do with the US embargo of Cuba, is a game where you play as a team of treasure hunters intent on plundering an island full of fantastic locales. The map is randomized each play so the locations are transient, and in fact it is the inconsistency of these locations that forms the main conflict of the game. You see, the moment you set foot on the island, it begins to sink in an Atlantean-curse style countdown to destruction. As your team explores the island, drawing cards so that you can claim its four treasures, areas become flooded and, if not properly sandbagged in time, eventually vanish from the board altogether. The result is a game where you need to be constantly repairing the map so that key locations (including the precious helipad at Fool’s Landing, your only escape) stay afloat. In a way it looks like reverse Carcassonne, with the map starting in perfect condition and slowly becoming more and more patchy. Collect the four treasures in time to escape in your helicopter and you’ll find victory, but if you lose any critical locations, allow the island to flood too often, or just straight up drown in the treacherous waters, the game wins. It’s us against the machines, people, and if you thought computer chess was bad, just remember that it can’t drown you. With good teamwork, Forbidden Island can be a breeze to play and is appropriate for younger gamers. But even though Forbidden Island is published by Gamewright, predominantly known for its children’s games (albeit fantastic children’s games,) don’t assume that its appeal is limited to the lil’ guys. The difficulty of this game is on a sliding scale that can be ramped up to a point where even the most seasoned player can still barely draw their first card through the slippery morass of sweat they’ve already produced.

Pandemic Lite?

If all of this gameplay sounds familiar, it may be because Forbidden Island is made by Matt Leacock, the same designer who created Pandemic, a similar game in which you fight off global disease in an Outbreak-style race against the clock. The games are, in fact, almost identical with a few exceptions. Namely, Forbidden Island is much more streamlined than Pandemic, with fewer options, a smaller scale, and less setup. The result is that Forbidden Island plays faster than Pandemic and is easier to learn, although may offer fewer strategic options for keen tactical gamers. This simplicity focuses the game though, and makes the actions more intuitive and less contrived. My games of Pandemic tend to transform into elaborate planning sessions detailing all of the things that need to get done across the next several turns with a level of detail that stops just short of needing PowerPoint. When I play Forbidden Island with my fiancé though, our plans tend to be more “you take the four on the left, I’ll take the four on the right.” It’s fast, it’s punchy, and the sense of personal danger intensifies the gravity of each move. In fact, we tend to speed up as we play until we’re racing through every turn just because the feeling of impending doom grows to the point where you’re convinced that if you pause to breathe your whole coffee table is going to cave in on itself.

An Island of Beauty

Knuckle-biting tension aside, one of the simple joys of Forbidden Island is its rich theme. The sense of exploration and adventure are palpable just from looking at the box, and when it comes to the character roles, I’d much rather be an explorer with a machete and a climbing-axe than some kind of civil engineer with a hard hat and a cellphone. Pandemic is a chilling race to save lives, but being set on a familiar map of the globe, it leaves little new ground to be uncovered. Forbidden Island’s unique, fanciful locations and randomly ordered map means that there is a real sense of wonder while playing it. There is a mysterious, almost Jules Verne-esque quality to spots with names like the Watchtower, the Crimson Forest, or the Cliffs of Abandon, and the magnificent artwork makes it all the more tragic when these locations slowly sink beneath the waves one by one.

Make no mistake, Forbidden Island is a game with tragedy designed into it. When you scramble with your loot onto the helicopter and lift off from an island that crumbles away from view beneath you, you are left with the knowledge that you destroyed it. It’s the ending of Last Crusade, where the cave comes down around the knight, sealing the tomb off forever. You weren’t saving the world down there, you were just after an adorable golden statue of a winged lion. You end the game knowing that something beautiful is gone because of your greed. It’s a victory that is always bittersweet, at least until you remake the map for another game.

Art by C.B. Canega

In August, The Game Shopper will be attending the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. PAX is the largest gaming expo in North America, and every year it showcases a staggering range of new titles in both electronic and clumsy old cardboard-based games.

You can expect to see me hanging around the board game floor at the show, and you can look forward to a lot of exciting previews post-event.

~Moss

*THE GAME SHOPPER HAS MOVED!*
The new link for this article is:  http://gameshop.com.au/blog/thegameshopper/2012/07/10/review-small-world/

Thanks for your patience.
~Moss

2-5 Players, Play Time 60-80 mins.

NOTE: Skip this first paragraph if you don’t like Stuart MacLean-isms about teaching school in small towns.

I can’t express how pleased I was when I walked into the high school library one lunch period between English classes and saw a group of students merrily bickering over a game of Dominion. I gave some terrible advice involving a witch, and they all politely ignored my ineptitude in favour of being flabbergasted that I knew anything about games at all. It’s the entitlement of the young to assume that nobody over the age of 19 has ever even heard that dice come in different shapes, never mind that they might themselves be passionate about gaming. These were kids from a little cowboy town where the one hotel has never gotten around to replacing it’s ‘E’ (the Hot-L is actually becoming a bit of a brand) so their exposure to games was limited. They didn’t have an easy outlet to try new products, so they had to take gambles on which games they mail ordered. So when they asked me my recommendation for a new game to buy, I immediately said Small World, because it was something I could be positive that they would enjoy.

Small World is played in geologic time, on a scale far longer than most war games. That isn’t to say that it takes long to play, oh no! No, no, you’ve misunderstood. The game is brief, perhaps 40-80 minutes. Certainly nowhere near the length of a game of Twilight Imperium. But each 45 minute game will span several centuries of existence in this small… world.

Rather than take control of one army and fight for dominance, in Small World you will control several great empires, watch them expand, and then witness their demise as they crumble into the history books and are replaced by a new fledgling society. It’s like watching a time-lapse video of Europe being swept clean by the Huns, who then fall back to make way for the Mongols, the Turks, the Moors, the Germans, and so on.

In fact, one of the first lessons in playing Small World is not to get attached. In the game’s 9-10 turns (depending on the number of players), one person can control up to 6 nations at the most prolific, with an average being around 3 or 4 in one game. But in Small World you can typically never replenish units, which means that if you hold on to one nation for too long, you’ll be unable to expand, desperately clinging to your territories with a skeleton crew (not literally, since the skeletons are one of the only races that can replenish.) But letting go of your nations? Letting them fall into decline while a fresh army sweeps the board? It’s hard! It’s hard because the races are the thing that make Small World so fun.

Each game, you have access to a jumble of races that become available in a random order. Each race possesses a unique quality, and is also paired with a power that is also randomly chosen. This means that every game, new combinations of races and powers emerge, and that is where the entertainment starts. The races and powers all have a whimsically cartoonish fantasy slant, which makes the game amusing to look at as well as more friendly for children (some controversy did follow the game’s release concerning the scantily clad amazons, but compared to most modern video games, Small World looks about as racy as a turkey sandwich.)

The powers range from flight and heroism to a love of swamps and a propensity for setting up tents, all of which change each race’s strategy significantly. The races themselves include all the best stereotypes from fantasy culture, with beer-swigging dwarves, bumpkin human farmers, eternally snacking halflings, prancing elves (a jab at Elfenland, if you ask me), inexplicably starfish-nippled fish men, and the aforementioned sultry amazons.

Of course, there are also a number of expansions that offer more powers and more races. Now, expansions really mean something in the world of board games. This isn’t video games, where bonus downloadable content can be made available on the very day a game launches, and is actually expected regardless of how well the game sells. In board gaming, the existence of an expansion means that a game made money and was well-liked by the community. Two expansions signifies a highly popular game that is still being appreciated long after its release date. Small World has no less than seven expansions and a spin-off title (which puts it close to rivalling even Carcassonne), and this definitely says something for its appeal.

One of the reasons for this plethora of add-ons is that Small World’s modular design just makes it so easy. Some games exist as closed circuits; their boards are complete, the sides are balanced, and everything that needs to be included already is. How would one create an expansion to chess, for example? (Yes, I’m aware that there are probably dozens of chess expansions. Keep them to yourself, I’m trying to make an argument.) Small World, on the other hand, is a game designed around randomization and the combination of foreign elements. If you throw a few new elements into the mix, all the better! The game thrives on spontaneity, and every session offers new surprises.

Some combinations of races and powers are appropriate (seafaring tritons), some are bland or nearly useless (diplomat skeletons), and some are frighteningly efficient (spirit ghouls.) But these sometimes unbalanced combinations are what lend this game it’s unique replay value and also something of an internal mythology. Amongst seasoned Small World players, few things terrify like the threat of flying sorcerers.
The fact that you will talk about Small World after you’re done playing it, telling your story of the merchant dwarves who overcame the odds to win you the match, or the fact that you’ll sit and stare at the components long after the game is finished, imagining dazzling new strategies, that is a testament to the character of the game, and that is something that every designer should aspire to create.

Although this site is still in the opening rounds of its life, we plan to expand into reviews, previews, and discussions about game theory, so check back soon for any new developments; or better yet, subscribe to see any new posts with the RSS feed or the e-mail “Follow” button below.

Happy gaming!

*THE GAME SHOPPER HAS MOVED!*
The new link for this article is:  http://gameshop.com.au/blog/thegamesshopper/2012/06/14/the-return-of-netrunner/

Thanks for your patience.
~Moss

Gamers the world over have cause to rejoice this year, as the classic card game Netrunner is slated for a hard reboot. Personally, I have another reason to celebrate, since the previously discontinued game is being resurrected under the banner of one of my favourite ridiculously overdeveloped, more-of-a-life-experience/therapy-session-than-a-game games, Android. As I implied in my previous discussion of this beautiful monstrosity, Android has enough theme for ten games squeezed into its bulging, brittle husk; so it’s no surprise that Fantasy Flight has positioned a few other games beneath Android to catch the spill-over before it dribbles all over the carpet. With the recently released Infiltration and the upcoming Netrunner, Android is becoming the franchise that film nerds all wish Blade Runner had become.

The Road Away From the Collectable Card Game
For most people though, the new theme is just the faintest feature in this monumental recovery of a gaming great. Netrunner’s original run was from 1996 to ‘99, and in its heyday it was a collectable card game similar to Magic: The Gathering. The similarities don’t stop there, either. Netrunner was actually created by Richard Garfield, the mastermind behind Magic Cards and just about every other collectable card game you can think of from the late 90’s.

booster pack from the first expansion

Being a CCG, Netrunner was vulnerable to the same limitations of chance and price that plague the genre. Packs of random cards had to be purchased, with variable results, and the price creep continued to rise as new expansions were released with new rare or uncommon cards that collectors and competitive gamers would have to rabidly chase down if they wanted their decks to stay relevant.

As you can tell, I’ve never been overfond of the CCG model. As a former Magic player, I know how expensive it can be to stay afloat in a continually evolving game. This is why I appreciate efforts to steer away from the CCG model, like Kosmos Games attempted with Reiner Knizia’s Blue Moon, or like Killer Bunnies continues to do. These are games where players can buy full sets, ready to play, and can add on to them with predefined boosters that are finite, regulated, and consistent in the cards they offer. No more disappointment when you tear open a ten dollar pack of random cards to find that you already own them all.

This, luckily enough, is what Fantasy Flight games is doing with their reboot of Netrunner. Joining the ranks of games like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Call of Cthulhu, Netrunner is going to be a “living card game,” which is FF’s term for a game that is fully playable at launch, but which will benefit from consistent monthly expansion packs that will feature a non-random selection of new cards. Is it still a way for the developers to suck in a steady stream of income from their content-hungry audience every month? Of course. But the core product of Android: Netrunner will still be fully playable, and should offer tons of replay value based on the brilliant mechanics of the game itself, not just on the value of the cards you buy.

Why it Came Back

The real reason everybody is salivating over this rerelease is because Netrunner was, is, and will be once more, a fantastic game. The ads all seem to focus on the fact that it is an ‘asymmetrical card game,’ meaning that each of the two players has a totally different set of cards and options, and this is definitely one of the key selling features of the game. One player takes on the role of a powerful multinational corporation, hellbent on advancing its agendas and protecting its secrets. The other player is a lone hacker, a netrunner, one puny figure who stands in the shadow of legions.

Like my favourite war game, War of the Ring, this is a game where one side holds all the power. The corporation sets up the board, creating secretive data forts that can be used to advance their agendas. The runner can try to crack into these forts, but will be opposed by the corporation’s defences. The runner’s advantage is that they can dart and weave and strike at exposed areas in the corp’s network.

Not even the corp’s hand is safe, in fact. The runner can attack the corp’s hand (thematically referred to as the ‘HQ,’) their deck (R&D,) or their discard pile (Archives.) The corp, however, can lay traps in any of these targets to cripple, wound, or even kill the runner. Indeed, the life of a renegade hacker is perilously fragile.

The beauty of Netrunner, though, goes beyond the dynamic nature of an asymetrical game or the ingeniously employed theme (no wonder Android took it over – barely a change needs to be made.) Even when it was a true CCG, surrounded by peers that were largely dominated by deck building and tactical purchases, Netrunner has been a game of choices. Each player is given multiple options on their turn that are not exclusively tied to their cards, making a player’s skill more important than the hand they drew. Indeed, I’ve heard whispered rumours of netrunners so talented that they’ve won games without playing a single card.
Such fairy tales are, of course, best left at the Wyldside club if you want to survive in the harsh, oppressive reality of running.

A Welcome Return
I have friends who still keep shoeboxes full of their old Netrunner decks, eager to pull any unsuspecting mark into the world of corporite espionage. Fantasy Flight states that some upgrades have been made to the original game to streamline it, and while these changes are largely unknown at the moment, early previews indicate that the game will maintain its core appeal. It will still be a deliciously robust cyberpunk game about either sticking it to the man or swatting the irritating insect that keeps buzzing around your secrets. With luck, the new release will appeal to the uninitiated as well as the old bastions, those friends with their shoeboxes.

The game is prepped to hit the shelves in August of 2012, and when it does I truly believe that we can hope to see one of the most exciting card game releases of the year.

*THE GAME SHOPPER HAS MOVED!*
The new link for this article is:  http://gameshop.com.au/blog/thegameshopper/2012/06/01/android-and-the-horrors-and-joys-of-thematic-games/

Thanks for your patience.
~Moss

When people ask about guilty pleasures, they tend to expect answers that involve trashy reality television or secret crushes on fictional characters. For me, my guilty pleasure is a game; and no, it’s not a game about raising ponies or about seeing the world as an impetuous young elf (although I do like that game, too.)

It’s Android. And at a surface glance, Android might not seem that embarrassing. It’s just a strategy game about solving mysteries. In the future. While portraying a conflicted archetype of a hard-boiled detective or a crooked cop. Or a robot. Who will either sink into despair or rise above their demons. A game in which you attempt to solve a crime not by determining who did it, but by pinning evidence on the patsy you want to go down. While you’re dealing with your estranged ex-wife. Or your daddy issues. Or racial tensions surrounding artificial intelligence and the nature of the soul.

You can see the slippery slope here. Android is a game that revels so much in its theme and pulls so few punches that it has spiralled into depths that would terrify a casual gamer. The game demands so much character development that if you play while wearing a pair of sunglasses, you’re practically LARPing.

But I love Android for this. For standing its ground without compromise to make a game that is more myth than mechanics. But after fifteen minutes of setting up the conspiracy board, arranging the totalitarian corporations on the board, and learning your character’s backstory, it does make you wonder about the role of theme in board games, and how far it should be followed.

For every game, the developers will be faced with a decision at some point. A series of decisions, really. About when to make gameplay concessions for the sake of theme or vice-versa, and about what methods they should use to express a game’s theme. You can typically spot a game that was built from the theme up as well as you can spot one that was built from the mechanics down. Reiner Knizia games, for example, tend to hold their place at the opposite end of the spectrum from Android. These are games that have few, if any, concessions to theme. They are designed mechanically to achieve a certain purpose, and then have a theme rolled across them like a coat of paint. Lost Cities, a game of numerical chicken, could easily be played with a deck of playing cards, but has been made into an archaeological epic through the addition of a few pretty pictures.

Another example is the card game classic Bohnanza. Although it is known almost universally as “the bean game” (at least by my parents) and seems to be inextricable from its theme, the game really has nothing to do with bean farming. Are garden beans really that much rarer than wax beans? The beans are arbitrary in the game. They are a coat of paint. In fact, in some of the expansions the designers tuck into bean varieties that don’t even exist, like cognac beans. This is a game that was designed for mechanical tightness, and then lent an outlandish theme and enough amusing art that at this point nobody could imagine Bohnanza without the beans.

So what is preferable? Although it’s hardly a rule, mechanically founded games tend to be faster to play and easier to learn than thematic goliaths. They tend to have fewer loopholes and to be more balanced. But there is something special that you get from a heady thematic game.

It’s atmosphere.

I feel more satisfaction as a farmer after a game of Agricola than after a game of Bohnanza. And while Robo Rallymay be faster to play, Android does a far superior job of filling you with the haunting loneliness of the synthetic lifeform.

The feel of a game is not something that is mechanically crucial to its enjoyment. But if you’ve ever thought back to the hobbies of your childhood, of endless hours where you played with toys that would be incapable of entertaining you now, you can appreciate the value of imagination. A frustrating or poorly designed game can still be given endless replay value if it has a theme that is capable of engaging a player’s creativity. And even the most mechanically sound game will falter if it leaves nothing to the imagination.

Think about chess, a game that is as old as the hills and that benefits from no glossy artwork or detailed backstory. Although it is commonly held as the pinnacle of the purely technical game, unmuddied by the grotesque concessions to theme that a game like Android makes, chess still has an imaginative concept. The world of chess is a world of battle, where kings and queens take to the field, aided by their religious advisors and cavaliers. There is enough spark in chess to capture the imagination.
And this spark is not a concession to theme that hurts the game, either. It’s just the same as the pictures in Lost Cities or the beans in Bohnanza. It’s the coat of paint that makes that game so satisfying to look at again and again.

It’s true that I may be quicker to pull Lost Cities from the shelf for a quick game with my girlfriend, since it’s hard to undervalue a game that is quick, clean, and concise. But when I have a lazy Sunday afternoon on hand, and I feel like just wrapping myself in an experience and getting lost, nothing can beat a good round of my own guilty pleasure.
I tend to leave the sunglasses off, mind you.

*THE GAME SHOPPER HAS MOVED!*
The new link for this article is:  http://gameshop.com.au/blog/thegameshopper/2012/06/01/schilmil-games-komodo/

Thanks for your patience.
~Moss

It’s always inspiring to see a new team of board game designers break onto the scene with their own self-published games. It’s even more inspiring when their games are actually good!

SchilMil Games is an independent production company run out of Auckland, New Zealand and founded by its two designers, the eponymous Julia Schiller and Amanda Milne. After their inception in 2011, SchilMil’s first two games have just now hit the shelves in the spring of 2012. In the card game category, SchilMil offers “Raid the Pantry,” a tactical collection game about cooking exotic meals. For board games, they bring “Komodo” to the table. And the table is better for it.

At first glance, Komodo has a familiar format. The game map is constructed by using variable tiles in a similar fashion as games like Carcassonne. Unlike these games, Komodo’s tiles are malleable, and a variety of action cards allow players to do things like rotate tiles that have already been played. Fans of visually precise tile laying games might be hesitant about Komodo, since its tiles do not bear the same restrictive placement rules as something like Tantrix. Since water doesn’t have to touch water, sand doesn’t have to touch sand, and so forth, the board tends to look more jumbled than the clean, meticulous lines of Tantrix or Carcassonne. The lack of restriction opens opportunities in gameplay, though. Players can block each others’ progress with a ferocious ease, but are typically held in check by a desire to claim a large plot of land for themselves.

Players will compete to capture portions of the budding territory by playing animals in any region large enough to support them. In this way, the game also resembles Zooloretto and it’s refined successor Aquaretto. SchilMil’s website does reveal that the game was originally planned as a zoo game. In its current form though, Komodo’s plot revolves around biologists trying to preserve as many rare animals as possible before a meteorite strikes the South Pacific. In this theme, Komodo scores another success.

By offering photo-realistic components that highlight many rare or even endangered animals and by enforcing the theme of preservation, the game speaks an environmental message without hammering the audience over the head with it. Rather than making a game that is about environmental responsibility, Schil and Mil have made a game that is about territory management and strategic moves, with the ethics coming as a side effect. Too often, games that attempt to make a statement sacrifice gameplay for their message, resulting in a lacklustre experience that comes across preachy. Komodo is, above all else, fun. It is entertaining, challenging, and full of variety. And after twenty minutes of looking into the soft, fuzzy eyes of a quokka, you will start to wonder how many of these critters are still in the wild, and how many would really survive if a disaster was ever to strike their home.

At the moment, The Games Shop in Melbourne is the only location outside of New Zealand to carry SchilMil’s games, but with a product this tight I have no doubt that they will soon find a foothold in the larger board game market.

All images courtesy of SchilMil’s website at www.schilmilgames.com