Restoration (Phuc Dung)

This is a game I am very excited to talk about. Restoration is a game from Vietnam, designed by Plum Tran and Toan Nguyen, and published under Ngu Hanh Games. It is a strategy game about restoration of the Kien Trung Palace. You play the role of artists and craftsmen. This is a worker placement game. It uses a rondel mechanism, and it has area majority competition. 

This is how a game is set up. You play three rounds, each round representing a period of two years. The three rounds are randomised and what you can do will be different depending on the round cards in play. You can see in the photo above that the round cards for 2021-2022 and 2023-2024 are still face-down. The one for 2019-2020 is revealed, dictating that rondel actions will move 2 steps, and you can play at most 1 manager card on your turn. 

This is your player board. You start with three workers in your colour and one neutral worker. Most of the time you place workers on the main board. However you have a placement spot on your player board too, and a mini rondel (where that big cube is). The section at the bottom right is for end-game scoring. Whenever you complete restoring a section of the palace, you get to claim one small cube. You place your cube in any of the five columns here to score end-game bonuses. Each column specifies a criteria you have to meet. For example the first column says you score 1 point per worker. Cubes you place here are a multiplier. 

Five interconnected board pieces form the main board, and together they form six squares where you can place workers. Each board piece has a rondel - a circuit of icons. When you place a worker, you get to move the cubes on either board piece next to your worker. Each step a cube advances lets you do something. Mostly it is doing restoration work. 

These large tiles are where the restoration work is done. Each tile represents a section of the palace. To work on restoring a section, you have to place a worker on the main board to advance a rondel cube, and that cube needs to advance to an icon which matches the next step here. You also need to commit a worker here to be used as a progress marker. This is quite challenging because you will have one worker fewer to work with. Technically you can work on two sections at the same time, but this means you are tying up two workers. When you complete a section, you claim the tile and your worker can rest. To ask him to come back to work, you will lose reputation. Reputation is like money in this game. You need to make sure you have enough to get people to continue working. 

This is the side board. The central section is the development area. You have a pawn here. Whenever you advance, you gain a benefit. One important benefit is unlocking an extra worker at step 3 and 7. More workers means more things getting done. The track on the right is for your reputation. I think of it as money. 

These are manager cards. They have all sorts of abilities. All of them have one basic ability, which is to advance the rondel cube one step. This is shown at the bottom right of every card. 

After you complete restoring a section of the palace, you claim the section tile. At the back you can read about that section of the palace. 

One important aspect of the game is collaborative construction. When you place a worker on a spot which already has other workers, after you perform your action, everyone else present here gets to perform a small action too - moving one adjacent rondel cube one step. In the game I played, some of us actively collaborated, and we got a lot of work done collectively. I heard that in another game, people played in a cutthroat manner and did their best to avoid helping others. I find this intriguing. 

This is where neutral workers have an impact. You should place workers in your own colour early, so that you can benefit from others placing workers here later, or even yourself placing more workers here. Neutral workers don't enjoy the collaborative construction bonus. 

Restoration has several moving parts, but they gel together well. I want to say it is a heavy strategy game, but it is not too heavy. I shall call it medium-heavy. There is a constant puzzle of how to perform restoration efficiently. Depending on the rondel situation on the main board, you may choose a different section to start restoring. If the next few steps on those five rondels show many red spaces, you probably want to start work on a palace section with many red spaces. It will make life easier for you. If you know your opponents need spaces of a specific colour to advance their restoration work, you can be a meanie and move the rondels past those colours. Oh you horrible person! 

You can actually compete on the same palace sections. This did not happen in the first 80% of our game, because we didn't want to take the risk and waste our efforts. However towards game end we did compete. Each palace tile is a race track. If two or more players work on the same tile, only the first to complete it claims the tile. This game can be rather cutthroat. 

There are opportunities to make big combos, and this is always fun. When you advance on the palace sections, some spaces give you bonuses. These bonuses can trigger chain reactions and help you further advance. 

In the game I played, I arbitrarily decided to go for the workers end-game bonus. That meant I wanted to unlock all my workers, and also in the last round I wanted to be able to win as many neutral workers as possible. Whenever I completed a palace section, I placed the bonus cube here. When you can see that your opponents are trying to work on specific scoring conditions, you should try to deny them. 

The area majority competition in the game comes into play at the end of a round. Notice that the worker placement squares have yellow dots. These are the strengths of each worker there. For each of the five board pieces, you compare who has the highest strength. He gets the right to recruit a neutral worker for the next round. He needs to pay reputation to recruit. It's not free. 

This was my play area at the end of our game. I restored many sections of the palace. Together we completed the restoration early in Round 3. Something felt off. It seemed too easy. Later we found out that we had played one important rule wrong. When you do collaborative construction, the bonus is only one step. We had played that you get the same number of steps as dictated by the round card. On many turns we moved twice instead of once. No wonder our restoration progressed so quickly. Oops. Still, we had fun with the game and it was very satisfying. 

This is a game for the more serious gamers, not casual gamers. It is not a typical Asian game. Asian games tend to be light and they target the casual crowd. We do have heavy gamers in Asia, but it is a small niche. I hope Restoration does well internationally. This is a breakthrough. We can have heavy strategy games from Asia too! 

The designers Plum Tran and Toan Nguyen

Here's an interview of Plum about her journey as an indie publisher in Vietnam. The English version is in the second half of the page.  

Bean to Bar

Bean to Bar is not your typical Japanese game. When I hear Japanese game, by default I imagine a short, minimalistic and clever card game with few components. Bean to Bar is a complex and heavy Euro style game with many more stuff than just cards. It is a game about making and selling chocolate. You build and run an artisan chocolate empire. 

In the game you need to do many things to complete the process of producing and selling chocolate. You will source cocoa beans, turn them into chocolate, submit your chocolate for competitions, recruit specialists to your company and open stalls to build your brand.

The core mechanism is this board with nine action tiles randomly arranged into a 3 x 3 grid. At the start of a round, you must advance your chef along the perimeter of this grid. Where it stops determines the three possible actions you can take that round, the ones your chef is facing. To take an action you must place one of your player tokens. The more actions you take this round, the more expensive it will be, in terms of time. Time is one precious resource you have to manage in the game. Taking an action does not block other players. In fact, if you take an action someone else has already taken, you get a discount.

Making chocolate is a mini polyomino game. You can turn the cocoa beans you have collected into dark chocolate, medium dark, or milk chocolate. Dark chocolate is more valuable and requires more cocoa beans. You take polyomino tiles from a limited supply to place on your own player board. For a chocolate product to be valid for sale or entering competitions, you need to have complete rows. That is a little puzzle you need to figure out.

Making money is very difficult. That means spending money, for example to buy time or to recruit a specialist, is painful. Another resource which is difficult to manage is your player tokens. Many actions require using one, sometimes committing it permanently. When you are the largest buyer in a region, you can score points from the region regularly, but you need to commit a player token. Points are hard to earn, so this is tempting. But player tokens are highly valuable too. Can you afford to lock down one player token?

Every few rounds there will be a competition. You probably want to enter as many competitions as you can.  Even if your product or products don’t win, you might still score some points. You do have to spend an action to sign up. Also when a chocolate product is entered into a competition, you cannot modify this product until after the competition. You will not be able to improve it for the time being, and your opponents might be able to develop an even better chocolate before the competition registration closing date. In case of ties, the earlier entry wins. So signing up early can be a strong advantage.

You can recruit specialists and promote them. At Levels 1 and 2, they give you special powers. At Level 3, they have no power but they can score more points. 

Two separate bags for cocoa and fruits

You can have at most four chocolate products

Bean to Bar is a tight game. There are many things you want to do, but your resources are limited. You must plan your actions carefully to do as much as you can with the limited resources you have. For me this is just okay. I found it a little fiddly. I don't think it is necessary to streamline this game. Simplifying it may not make it better. It is what it is, and players who like this type and weight of game will understand the charm. I appreciate how strategic the game is. It is an open information game. It's just that I am less attracted to this genre now. This is certainly a challenging game and if you like a challenge, go for it! 

Rajas of the Ganges

  

Rajas of the Ganges is a 2017 game from Inka and Markus Brand, who made the Exit series. It was nominated for and won several awards. It was well received by gamers. I wasn't very interested to try it when it was hot, because it sounded like just another worker placement game, with dice. It was suggested at a recent game retreat, so I joined the game. It turned out to be much more enjoyable than I expected. 

This is a worker placement game, and the dice are a resource you often need to spend when placing workers. They come in different colours and they have different values. Some worker placement spots on the board require specific die colours or die values. Your dice are an important resource to manage. There are ways to gain dice, and you want to maintain a healthy number on hand so that you have more flexibility. You need to strike a balance between using dice to get various resources, and replenishing your dice. 

The main gameboard has many worker placement spots, and the score tracks. There are two score tracks, one to keep track of your money, and the other your fame. They go in opposite directions. Zero is at the bottom right. Money increases in an anti-clockwise manner, while fame increases in a clockwise manner. To win the game, you need to increase both your money and your fame so that your two markers meet each other. When I saw this I said hey that's Ark Nova! But Rajas of the Ganges was published earlier, so it had this mechanism first. It is clever. You can choose which aspect you want to focus more on. Actually there is a 2006 game called Gift Trap which has a very similar concept.

Those square tiles below the gameboard are terrain tiles you can place on your player board, which represents developing your own province. One action in the game lets you pick a tile to add to your province. 

When adding tiles to your province, the roads along the edges of the tiles must line up properly. When you are able to connect icons along the edges of your board to your capital (at the top), you gain bonuses, e.g. dice, money, or fame. Certain buildings in your province also help you gain fame or money. 

There is a river on the gameboard, and you can advance your ship along the river. Your ship only moves in one direction. When it stops, you gain the benefit of the space it is on. Ships block one another, and force other passing ships to leapfrog ahead. If you want to move fast, you can choose to leapfrog the others. By doing this, you will skip spaces and miss their benefits, but further down the river the benefits get better. So it is not necessarily a bad thing. 

I enjoy playing the game, but I struggle to articulate why. I think I overestimate how important innovation is in games. Rajas of the Ganges does not offer anything particularly new to me. No surprise, since this is a game from almost 10 years ago. I tell myself I shouldn't be enjoying it so much. I'm always looking for new ideas in games. They excite me. Rajas of the Ganges does not give me anything unusual, but it does give me a well put together package of mechanisms and play experiences. You need to pursue money and fame, and you compete to do so efficiently. There is some engine building to help you score fame and money more quickly by utilising buildings and strengths you have accumulated. There is a constant need to stay flexible. You want a healthy number of dice in hand, so that you have more options. You want to have some karma in hand too. Karma is something you can spend to flip a die to the opposite side. If you run out, you suddenly lose this flexibility. The game is tactical. You must stay alert for opportunities, for example new tiles that get revealed, or river spaces which your opponents vacate, or die values that you roll. There are opportunities for clever combos. Sometimes by performing one action, it gives you something which in turn triggers gaining something else, which then triggers yet another thing. These are satisfying. 

Turn order is important. I certainly felt the need to fight for it. The game gives you some mid term goals. When you reach a certain money, fame or river level, you get to unlock additional workers. Every worker means being able to do more in a round. Unlocking them is something you must deliberately plan for. 

One type of difficult decision I have to make is grabbing a windfall at the cost of losing flexibility for the next few turns. There is something very tempting on the board I can do, but if I do that, I will for example spend almost all my dice. I can get something now, but I know for the next few turns I have to painstakingly gather some new dice. Sometimes I go ahead and grab that windfall. Sometimes I pass. The beauty is I don't have an easy answer for situations like this. These are the juicy and difficult decisions you have to make in Rajas of the Ganges.

A big thank you to J&J! Jon (right) for recommending the game and Julian (left) for teaching the game. Julian completely destroyed us. He was highly intentional in building up fame, and he managed many powerful combos. He also advanced his ship far ahead of us. I had a lot of fun with this game. It's a joy to discover some good older games. 

Meadow

Meadow is a game about wildlife in the countryside. The key underlying concept is the food chain. You need certain terrain to be able to support certain plants, you need certain plants to be able to support certain insects, and in turn these insects are food to small animals, and then these small animals are prey of larger animals. You collect and play cards with various icons. The icons allow you to play more cards, and as you "upgrade", you get to play cards with victory points. That is how you eventually win. 

Cards are made available in this 4x4 grid. Every round, you have five tiles which you can use for claiming and playing cards. You place a tile along the edge of this board, pointing at a specific row. Depending on the number on your tile, you take a specific card in that row. 

You can have at most 10 columns of cards in your play area. A column always start with a terrain card. Terrain cards have no prerequisites. All other cards do. Normally cards specify the icons you need to have in order to play them. When you play a non-terrain card, it must partially cover another card. You may cover icons on other cards, causing you to lose these icons. The game requires carefully planning to get to specific icons. You also need to plan carefully when to use which icons. 

You start with a hand of cards. You already have to plan carefully from the get go. The numbers on the leaves are the victory point values. They go from 1 to 5. 

Each player tile has two parts. The pointy part is used when you claim a card from the grid display. The flat part can be used for something else. Let's go from left to right. The two circles are road icons. If you use this, you get to claim two road tiles. Road tiles allow you to play cards which have a landscape layout. The second tile lets you claim any one card from the grid. This is different from using the pointy part. When you use the pointy part, you get to play a card too. If you use the flat part, you don't get to play a card. 

The third tile is a joker. You can treat it as any flat part icon. The fourth tile lets you draw three cards from any deck then keep one. 

This is the other game board. This keeps track of the round number. You play 6 rounds. All those icons around the fireplace is a source of competition. When you have a pair of adjacent icons in your play area, you get to claim the seat between these two icons, placing your point marker. You have three point markers valued 2, 3 and 4. You must place them in this order. 

Any any time there are three decks used for refilling the board. The East cards are mostly terrain cards. The West cards are usually cards related to roads, houses and fences, i.e. human civilisation. The South cards are mostly animals. At mid game, the South cards are replaced by the North cards. These are higher valued animals. 

I think of Meadow is a pyramid building game. You collect and play cards with the right icons to help you play higher value cards. You need to have a strong foundation to be able to build many high value cards. You must plan carefully how icons will be covered by other cards. Timing is very important. You don't want to accidentally cover an icon which you still need. Player interaction can be unforgiving. You will compete for those cards with rare icons. If you watch you opponents closely, you can tell what they need and you can deny them those cards. Even without intentionally frustrating your friends, you sometimes do so accidentally because you have placed your tile in a slot they plan to use. 

The game is almost overproduced. It has pretty card trays and a wooden round marker which to me are not really necessary. They do provide a nice play experience. They are a luxury. 

Gameplay is a pleasant experience. It is satisfying to collect the right combinations of icons and to play those high valued cards. Collecting the right cards can be challenging. You can't pick any card you want. You need to think about how best to use your tiles. This is not really a game for casual players. The game mechanisms are slightly complicated, and even I find myself in long pauses thinking about what I should do next. The game is certainly challenging enough for seasoned gamers. There is some luck, in terms of what kind of cards become available. It is satisfying to work out what you can do given the situation you are in. You certainly make meaningful choices. You can choose to play this in a more peaceful way, without deliberately trying to mess with your opponents. You will be kept busy enough managing your own play area. 

La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War

La Famiglia is a little unusual. It is a game for exactly four players (like mahjong!), and it is played in teams of two. You are mafia families in Sicily, and you compete to control the most regions. You win immediately when you control 5 regions, or your team controls 6 regions. If no one achieves this after four rounds, the team controlling more regions wins. 

Every region on the map has three spaces. You need to control two out of three spaces to control a region. On the map the cubes are your gangsters. You can build drug factories which help you make money and boost your defence. You have cars which help you in offense. You have boats that give you mobility to attack more distant spaces. 

Every round consists of a planning phase and an execution phase. Two planning boards are used in the planning phase. There are player discs and neutral discs on one board, and on your turn you must move one to the other board. The space you move it to determines the action you get to perform, for example earning money, recruiting gangsters, deploying gangsters, buying cars and placing order tiles. Depending on whose disc you move and the space you move it to, there may be costs involved. This mechanism is actually worker placement but a little more elaborate. 

In the execution phase you reveal order tiles that have been placed on the map during the planning phase, and you execute them. This is when attacks take place. Not all order tiles are for attacking. Some are for defending. Fighting involves no dice. Being the attacker you can choose to use a brute force approach to resolve the attack, which is deterministic. However if you want to achieve better results, e.g. losing fewer people in the process, you can take a gamble and play a little mind game. This involves players playing cards face down and then they choose how to apply the opponent's card - to the opponent or to themselves. The end result might be better, or it can also be worse than using brute force.

Every player has a player board. One of the things you can do is to remove discs from your player board. This upgrades your abilities, for example making your car bombs more destructive. When you improve beyond certain thresholds, you unlock new order tiles that are better than the basic ones you start with. Notice that the families in the games are a little different. They have different advanced order tiles. 

When you control regions, you enjoy special bonuses, for example, allowing you to recruit more gangsters. You can choose these bonuses but you need to coordinate this with your partner because you can’t both take the same one. These region bonuses allow you to customise your play.

This is generally a dudes on a map game, an area control game. You have to manage two important resources - money and gangsters. You attack, you defend. You do your best to control regions. There are neutral pieces on the map. In our game, I didn’t attack them much, because the other team was the bigger threat to me. In hindsight I should not have taken such a simplistic approach. After all, the goal is region control, not killing enemies. This is almost a perfect information game. The main uncertainties are the order tiles which are placed face-down, and the little mind game you can choose to play when you attack. There is much strategising and planning you can do. The game is confrontational. It is also calculative due to how deterministic most of the game is. The art is colourful, but make no mistake. This is a pretty serious game. 

I first saw the game at Essen 2024, and it's pretty!

Limit

Limit covers a serious topic. It is a simulation of modern human civilisation. It is based on the Meadows Report "The Limits to Growth", which says that because our planet and its resources are finite, constant growth is impossible. We will sooner or later hit a saturation point. Yet humans behave as if there is not such limit. Every corporate CEO is expected to achieve ever higher results. We chase the newer phone, the fancier car, the bigger house. The game is designed with an intention to make people think about how we behave as humankind. 

In the game, each player manages a nation over several generations, beginning from 1850, i.e. the start of the industrial revolution. You manage food production, consumer goods production, weapons production, the quality of life of your people, social unrest and your population. All if this is done using a card drafting and card play mechanism. You can trade in the global markets. Your actions have various consequences. 

This is your player board. The green, blue and red tracks are your production levels for food, consumer goods and weapons. All aspects of your nation are represented here. 

This is the quality of life of five classes of your society, from richest to poorest. You must improve the quality of life of a richer class before you can improve others below it. It is possible to try to give everyone a similar quality of life (like the above), or you can also choose for the richest to have a good life while the poorest suffer. Different rules and abilities apply depending on the quality of life levels of Classes A, C and E. That is why you may want to have specific classes at specific levels. Class A having a higher quality of life gives you more options in picking policies. This helps you better govern your nation. The quality of life of Class C affects the consumer goods being consumed by your nation and also the birth rate. At the end of the game, Classes A, C and E contribute to your score. 

This is your population level and your social unrest. Quality of life affects population growth, and population in turn affects how much food and consumer goods you need. Social unrest is on a scale from Boom to Growth to Uprising. Various things you do affect social unrest. Naturally you want to avoid hitting the uprising positions. 

This is the central board, and it represents the global market. Food, consumer goods, weapons and fuel are bought and sold here, and prices are influenced by player actions. The bank in the game is called the IMF. It has a lot of money, but it might run out of money and trigger a financial crisis. 

These cards are the meat of the game. You start the game with some basic cards, and every round you may get some new ones. There are three decks in the game - society, production, and military / economy. Which deck you choose to draw from determines what kind of cards you will get. In the action part of a round, players take turns playing cards. Generally these cards help you build your nation and tweak it in different ways. Some cards allow you to attack other nations, like this one below. 

I played the game on BoardGameArena.com. I must admit I didn't have enough patience to remember all the rules. I played by gut feel and let the computer handle the consequences of my actions. I took a communist path, or at least that was how I perceived myself. I kept the quality of life as equal as possible for all social classes. I did have to increase Class A first, but once it is one notch above the rest, I prioritised improving the quality of life for all the other classes before coming back to take care of Class A again. I knew there would be some drawbacks, but I just stuck with this. It turned out to work well for me. I think I was lucky with the cards I drew. They synergised well. I didn't pay attention to the other players. They seemed to struggle a bit. 

My population grew. My production capacities grew. I was strongest militarily. I was a little tempted to attack others, just to see how it worked, but eventually I didn't because it felt cumbersome. Since I was already ahead (at least I thought so then), I didn't need to use military to get ahead. I did start to run out of land. If I could capture others' territories it would help me continue to grow. 

Our game ended because we had four crises. The other way the game ends is completing 7 rounds. I was a little surprised that one of the crises worsened my social unrest so much that I went into uprising. I had been managing my social unrest pretty well. At one point, all my social classes had the max quality of life. I was pretty pleased with myself. I did right by my people. However I was shocked to find out that I did horribly at the final scoring. I had too much pollution and lost many points for that. My people still had the best quality of life, but my population was low so that didn't give me many points. I should have paid more attention to how scoring worked. Jia Yaik made a lot of money and that gave him many points. Eventually it was Jon who won because he was well balanced and screwed up the least. 

I think the intention of the game is we are supposed to try to survive and hopefully thrive till the end of the 7th round. If we trigger four crises before that, it feels like we have lost because we have mismanaged our planet. This is a game with a lot of rules. Many elements of your nation affect others. This is a complex simulation and you do a lot of housekeeping. It is like work. This is actually a lesson about nation-building and international geopolitics. I find it a little tiresome to learn the rules. It takes a fair bit of effort to fully understand all the implications of your choices. Yet, I have some curiosity to see how we can survive till the end. If I'm going to play this again I certainly need to have more discipline in understanding it better. Most of the time the gameplay feels solitaire. You are managing your own nation. Actions at the global market do affect other players, but that interaction isn't that strong. Military actions affect opponents more directly, but it depends on whether players use them much. I am tempted to try this just to see whether we can last till the end.