On Mars

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Components: Amazing components and fitting art. Great storage and game box as well. First rate all-around.

Game Setup: Our first setup took about 35 minutes. Subsequent setups will be quicker and easier but still I can’t see the setup being less than 15 minutes.

Mechanics: Resource management, engine building, variable player powers, supply and demand, action selection, tile laying.

Game Play: Place your workers and choose when to ride the shuttle to and from orbit and the colony to choose from a different set of actions. Build basic and advanced structures, increase your worker pool, advance your tech tree, recruit scientists.

Last Word: A heavy game with tons of theme and interwoven options, there isn’t anything like On Mars out there to compare it to. While its very heavy its design makes it seem less heavy than it is and the bigger picture starts to form as you make your way through your first play. With many paths to victory and so much interwoven choices and layers its quite the adventure to even figure out much less excel at. That said, we found it to be a fantastically fun adventure regardless of what the scores were at the end of the game. Since the time commitment on this is huge the gaming ROI might not be as great as the overall experience is though I can see cutting our playing time in half as we get more experience. If you like heavy games with lots of layers this is highly recommended.

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Atlantis Rising

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Components: Atlantis Rising is a mixed bag concerning components. The deluxe components are fantastic, especially the crystal ones. However they did not include enough meeples of each color to play when using different player counts, which seems rather cheap. Also the rules leave a lot to be desired and are ambiguous in a lot of situations.

Game Setup: Our setup took 15 minutes. Building the main board, selecting components available to build, setting the library deck and the misfortune deck and adjustments for player count took some time.

Mechanics: Worker placement, variable player powers, resource management, dice-rolling, cooperative.

Game Play: Place workers, suffer misfortune, take worker actions, repeat until win or lose.

Last Word: Atlantis Rising is one of those coop games where the alpha gamer will prevail. Its nothing more than collecting and spending the required resources to build structures that are determined at game setup. For us, nothing is more boring than table-talk about who is going to collect resource A and who is going to collect resource B, etc. Think cooperative Stone Age where you roll dice to collect resources, which is fun risk mitigation in a competitive setting but for a coop game its tedious. This game might have value as a solitaire game and its probably much more enjoyable as an game app for a single player, but as a full presentation board game I’d skip this one unless you have grade-school age kids where this kind of simple cooperative planning is a constructive way to burn an hour plus.

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In the Hall of the Mountain King

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Components: Fantastic quality components and nice art. Some of of the icons on the board could be more distinct but this is a minor gripe.

Game Setup: Our first setup took about 20 minutes. Subsequent setups should only take 10 minutes or less.

Mechanics: Resource management, engine building, tableau building, route building, variable player powers.

Game Play: Recruit trolls to gain resources and activate existing trolls in your trollsmoot. Dig tunnels to connect to areas to build workshops to earn variable powers to use each turn or tunnel to scoring opportunities.

Last Word: A unique take on tableau building that is heavy on resource management. Predetermined tunnel shapes gives interesting choices when tunnel building. After couple plays with 2 players its seems it might have a runaway leader problem but that may be mitigated by a more crowded play field with 3 or 4 players or just choosing closer start locations – in any case it did not dampen the fun for either of us. If you enjoy engine building games you should give this a try.

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Anachrony

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Components: High quality components and some great art design.

Game Setup: This is a large package with larger player boards and a lot of components. Setup for our first game took a solid 20 minutes, maybe more. Subsequent games should take less time but 10 minutes would be a fast setup for this beast.

Mechanics: Worker placement, resource management, time manipulation, um, yeah…

Game Play: A game with several phases, most of it is worker placement, but its on multiple levels.

Last Word: Anachrony is a heavy-weight game that we found to be heavy-weight fun. There isn’t much out there like it so its hard to compare it to something else. If you like heavy, heady games that have tight resource management, this is a game you must try!

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Glen Moore II Chronicles

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Components: The usual high quality components you expect from a designer edition Kickstarter product, good art, and nice organization/presentation.

Game Setup: Variable depending on the modules being played but nothing too long – usually 5 to 10 minutes.

Mechanics: Action selection, Rondell, tile-laying, resource management, variable player-powers.

Game Play: Select your actions on the Rondell by selecting a tile and then when you place the tile it activates it and all the tiles around it.

Last Word:  Very clean design and a great presentation. Lots of replay-ability and good gaming ROI time-wise.

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