And that was March 2025

As always, passing by March makes time feel like it’s moving fast; we’re now a quarter of the way through the year!

We had a visit to our South coast friends which saw some more 4-player experiences of games we all normally play at 2. And we finally got the chance to see what all the FROMAGE fuss is about

And as if all that wasn’t enough, my wife has finally found her way to sitting opposite me as I adventure through the ARKHAM HORROR LCG campaigns, something that I’m over the moon about. Her first experiences weren’t great and it almost turned the game into a solo only experience for me. But one last try with a different Investigator (big thanks to Nathaniel Cho) and she is asking to play it more than I ever expected. Good times ahead.

So lets get stuck into New Arrivals and Games Played.

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION – At the end of the summer last year I got an Instagram message from IncrediQuest Games asking if I wanted a copy of their soon to fulfill game for reviewing. This one is a 2-player only deduction game and I was curious as to how that would work. So I said yes in the hope of finding out. I checked the page and saw there was a small travel version of the game and figured it would be fun to try. 6 months later and the deluxe copy turned up, which was a plesant surprise. It comes with a lot more content than the travel version with some gorgeous deluxe components and a good sized box to store it all in.

STAR REALMS: RISE OF EMPIRE – Well, this one had been a long time coming, especially if, like me, you were an EU or UK backer. It was my first Wise Wizard Games crowdfunding campaign, so I wasn’t super aware of their snails pace history. Sure, I’ve had delayed campaigns before (SENJUTSU, BARDWOOD GROVE, and THE AGE OF ATLANTIS to name a few) but as always it’s less about the time frame and more about the lack of communication and perceived lies around any delays. This was the same and it immediately put a sour taste in a lot of backers mouths. The game was supposed to fulfill in June of 2023, but the first games trickled through to US backers in September 2024. It then ended up taking an extra 5-6 months for EU and UK backers, with UK backers getting stuff from two different fullfilment centres in two different countries depending on what you added on. It also hit retail before we got our copies. And lets not forget that some reviews haven’t been glowing and the game isn’t as Legacy as it was presented. But it’s here now, it’s become my second longest delayed game (which makes me lucky compared to some campaigns that I’ve seen), and at the end of the day, we both love STAR REALMS as a game. Hopefully we can still enjoy the game itself.

SYLVION – With February being a dry month for getting through the Shelf Of Shame, I decided to kickstart March with a solo game. I still had two Oniverse games I’d yet to try so I went for the older of the two. SYLVION is basically tower defense. If you’ve played the classic video game, Plants vs Zombies, you’ll have an idea. Replace Dave’s house with your forest, and swap out Zombies for a raging inferno, and you’ve got this game in a nutshell. SYLVION is one of the Oniverse games that plays without tokens or boards. The entire grid layout is just cards. The Flame cards slowly creep from right to left while you planet trees and little water cards to hold back the impending doom. It’s a game where you never feel on top; it’s all about damage limitation and putting the right cards in play at game end to give you the win condition. It is a nice little puzzle that I look forward to working out.

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION – A deduction game for two players. Not the most common player count for this sort of big group genre. I watched several How To Plays and struggled to ‘get’ the concept and mechanisms in play here. You each have a face down card that the other player is trying to work out. You take turns working through the limited deck, playing cards for specific abilitles, using them to block your opponent, or just removing them from the game to keep information from your opponent. And while you’re working through known information to work out the number on their suitcase card, that’s not all there is to it. Thinking that you know their number is only half the battle. You need to have that number on the last card you have in hand. It’s a clever little game that has you thinking about how to play each and every card you draw. Abilities are powerful, but information is king here. A face down card can be crippling for you. It’s a nice addition to our 2-player only collection and I look forward to more games with the other available decks.

THE AGE OF ATLANTIS – This game sits as another of my ‘rough kickstarter experiences’ and because of that, maybe it’s sat on the shelf for longer than it could have (that and the over condensed and incoherent rule ‘sheet’). But I’d started to see it show up on several Instagram posts in recent weeks and it gave me an itch to finally try it. Turns out, if you scrub that bad Kickstarter experience taste away, there’s an interesting game buried beneath. Worker placement is my favourite genre, and THE AGE OF ATLANTIS does it well. Workers have a mood to them and the better the mood, the more extra action you can choose to accomplish. But if they go down to the lowest mood, it will upset Posiden. The circular city of Atlantis starts limited with a single space for each of the boards eight sectors. But once you upgrade workers to Atlantians, they can work outside the main walls. They can also call in Myths, mighty mechanical machines based on mythilogical creatures like Pegasus and Cerbarus. And while all this is going on, foreign armies are moving in, CASTLE PANIC style. This adds a little semi co-op to the game but also give you the chance to sit back and see your opponents take a nasty hit that you maybe could have prevented. It’s fun. And it has asymetric boards for each player encouraging a different playstyle depending on which faction you play as. It’s a lot better than I expected and definitely has a permanent place in the collection now.

FROMAGE – A game that is definitely a current hotness, and one I originally skipped by on Crowdfunding (more due to finances than interest). Players put down pieces of cheese in the quarter of the board in front of them with a worker on top and then rotate the board 90 degrees. The clever mechanic comes from the direction the worker faces when you place them. This determines how early they come back. Weak actions mean they’ll come back on the next turn, while the strongest actions take three turns before you’ll see them again. And you only have three workers. For a game that looks like it’s just four mini games passing by you one after the other, there is a little strategy in the choices you have to make with each worker. This is also made a little more complicated by some spots needing certain coloured workers (your three workers are each a different colour). And as the game goes on, the spaces get fewer and fewer meaning that you might find yourself with a worker you can’t place. It was a game that was thinkier than I expected, but perhaps a little too light and fluffy still. The simultaneous play means that the game has a consistant playtime, but it’s simply rotate, head down, rotate, head down, unil someone triggers the game end. I think it’s a game I would happily play, but not own

ARBOREA – At a time when our friends picked up BITOKU, we skipped it because it was silly to double up on games across both collections. Then Ally Cat Games came a long with ARBOREA and I figured we’d grab that instead. And then (stop me if this sounds familiar) it sat on out Shelf for many, many, many months. But after a Meeple University teach, we got it to the table for 2-player and it was a delightful little game. Sure, there’s a lot going on with the board, and for someone like me, it can be overwhelming (leading to a lot of AP). But I think a couple of plays and you’ll start to get what the different tracks cover making your placement quicker. The time track mechanism (regularly compared to TZ’OLKIN) works well and the shared market tracks are an interesting way to balance risk reward (take a bunch of points but leave the resources for other players). Like BITOKU, it’s not as daunting to play as the busy board suggests. I also feel that, of the two, it would be the easier relearn if too much time had passed between plays. After one play, I think I lean a little more to ARBOREA.

STAR REALMS: RISE OF EMPIRE: So, did the more negative reviews have the right idea? Did the delays take anything away from the first few plays? Yes and no. The fact that amending the cards with stickers (or cards if you purchased the Infinite Replay Kit) runs out of steam earlier than you’d expect was a bit of a surprise. You only get new stickers in the first four games, and while you can keep upgrading from these sheets for the rest of the campaign, you are lmiited to just 20 upgrades each for the whole thing. That said, there are more things revealed, unlocked, and included as you go on. Some are used to balance the game (giving the losing player a few benifits) while others add randomness into the scenarios. Almost everything included is already available via expansion packs for normal STAR REALMS. This game has the feel of AEON’S END LEGACY, to a degree, where the introduced mechanics and components are more for newer players to the system than STAR REALMS veterans. The only new thing that stood out was the ‘when aquired’ ability of non-upgraded cards. This sometimes made one of us purchase a ship based just on this extra immidiate effect. But how was the overall experiance? Well, we both love STAR REALMS (favourite Deck Builder), and it actually had us playing 9 games in a row on a Saturday evening (Scenarios 2-10). And despite my wife feeling bad that she was crushing me for the first four plays, I came back to level things out going into the finale. Unfortunately, that finale was, perhaps due to its twist, a bit of a dissappointing ending to the campaign. I won’t spoil what happens, but I will say that we both feel it perhaps belonged as a secret scenario for after the campaign’s completion. The fact that there is a secret 13th post campaign scenario that we were not interested in trying out makes it a more wasted oppourtunity. Of course, that’s one playthrough. Would things run the same on another campaign? Would it be any different if we swapped factions? Well, we are going to find out. For a company that won’t shut up about balance, we’re a bit suspicious about this one. For now, it’s fully resert and holds a place in our collection. But as we have everything for the normal game, it’ll be interesting to see how long it can stay.

SALTON SEA – To balance the games that have gathered dust on our Shelf Of Shame for years, SALTON SEA only took a few months from arrival. I’m one of many who are really enjoying Devir’s output in recent years and this was another one I was eager to try. First impressions have this one quite high in my ratings. If it keeps me hooked, it’s definitely got a chance for this years top 50. And that’s with one rules gaff that made things a lot more difficult than they should have been (it was my misinterpretation of a rule). I’d also like to try it at 4, though I can already see this adding a lot more play time. But the busy looking board slowly translated itself to us as we reached the halfway point, and knowing how everything works now will help us plan more from the start next time round.

• Finishing our groups D&D campaign after 16 months . . .
• . . . and then me returning to the GM chair as we switch to a Land Of Eem campaign.
• STAR REALMS: RISE OF EMPIRES finally turning up!!! It’s a miracle.
• Getting to enjoy ARKHAM HORROR LCG with my Player 2.