Y2Jant Reviews: Roll Through the Ages

Through the Ages is known as one of the top civilization games to play. However, it’s a long game to play and could take many hours to play with friends. Actually, trying to get your friends to play the game is a bit hard, unless they like those kinds of games. Roll Through the Ages is the same game but as you can tell by the name, you roll dice to determine what you do.

First of all, the game comes with 7 wooden dice and 4 pegboards. The quality of the components themselves is the best I’ve seen in a small game. It’s light and feels great too so you can take it on the go. The game also comes with a huge stack of double sided score pads so that’s nice as well.

You start off with three dice and each side of the dice represents a different symbol. You can either gain food to feed your cities, gain workers to help build monuments or build more cities to roll more dice. And you can gain goods and coins to build developments, avoiding certain disasters or gaining extra food or workers per dice. Disasters are represented as skulls and for everyone you roll, you must keep (unless your playing the solo version of the game). Each disaster will cost you points or your opponents might lose points. 

Using the pegboard is easy. The green color is your food and goes up and down with the food you get. Everything else is your goods and every good you roll, one goes up from the bottom to the top. However, if you have more then 6 goods out, then you must get rid of them.

The game is good when you want to play a quick solo game or with 4 players, the fun really starts to pick up. Your battling to build an monument first so that you can get the points in the square. If you do build it, everyone else will earn the points next to the square. At the end of the game, whoever has the most points wins the game and has the mightiest empire!

Y2Jant Reviews Caverna

Uwe Rosenberg is known all over the world as one of the best game designers, from Bohnanza to Agricola, he either likes farming or beans. Caverna: The Cave Farmers is what many people are calling Agricola 2.0. The game itself not only makes you have your little farm but now, you get to mine in a cave! Yes, sounds exciting but this made me love the game that much more.

 (Just look at it people, so many components)

If anyone has ever played Agricola or any worker placement game, you will understand Caverna. If not, you do have to learn what each action space on the board does in order to get resources, get fields or mine and expand within your cave. Over the course of 12 rounds, you have to feed your dwarves, gather some animals and try to aim for the most points at the end of the game.

The game itself takes about 30 minutes per player so games can get really long inbetween downtime but when you see what’s in front of you, you wouldn’t want to stop (just don’t try to get 7 players to play, that seems a bit long). Caverna replaces the cards from Agricola with the action board, which changes depending on how many players are playing. Rubys are a new component that allows you to trade them for wood, stone, grain, pumpkins or anything else that will get you what you need to feed your family.

A new part of the game is the cave itself. Now you can mine your cave to make more to furnish your caverns to add new rooms to grow your family or any of the other furnishing tiles that comes with the game. You can use these tiles to gather more resources or give you more victory points at the end of the game.

(This was the end of a 5-Player game and it was fun)

Another new feature is the expedition. Now you can use ore to forge a weapon (between a level 1-8), then going on an expedition to find loot based on your level. After that, you can level up before moving on. This is a neat feature that makes get loot others might take on the action board. You can also use a ruby to allow your weapon dwarves to go first instead of allowing your weaker ones go first, a move that could change the game.

Now, when it’s all said and done, the game is pretty pricy at $90.00. However, you are getting 7 pounds of a great game and all the wooden meeples too! From grains to pumpkins, sheep to dogs, ore to rubies, you get everything in the box. Along with over 400 pieces of cardboard to punch out, the box just closes (I went with two plano boxes to get the job done to sort everything).

If you are on the fence about the game, wait till you can at least get it at the 90 dollar price point because with so many components and with a great game, Caverna is a hit for 2013 and I bet we will see an expansion in the future.

Y2Jant Reviews: Takenoko

At this point in time, board games come in all shapes and sizes. One of these games actually holds a story behind it. Just a gift from one nation to another, which caused one person to completely lose their minds as an animal decided to have lunch with everything related to different colors of bamboo. I'm here to talk about Takenoko.

Takenoko is a 2-4 player game which places you in the middle of a pond, trying to complete objectives based upon how you make the board. You can control the Gardener, a man who can grow bamboo on the space and every space surrounding him of the same color. But you can also control the Panda, who can eat bamboo and add it to your collection. The three main colors are red, yellow, and green of bamboo you can grow and the land you choose as well. This can go hand in hand because you can be able to complete different tasks to get you the most points in the end.

As you can see, this is how the game board would look like after a couple of turns of selecting tiles. Improvements help the tiles in their own way. You can have a tile protected from the bamboo, making it impossible for the panda to eat it. You can also fertilize it to grow two bamboo stacks instead of just one. And you can have a water tile on it, making it possible to grow bamboo. The water blocks are a way to get water to the outer most tiles on the board that are far away from the center tile. Finally, you can roll the weather dice after the first round to give you an extra action, double down on a single action plus 4 other weather conditions to make the game that much interesting.

Everything about the game is just beautiful, from the bamboo wood pieces to the dice itself, the game is just beautiful in every way. You have the ability to place the tiles to meet some of your objectives. You can have the Panda cards, which allow you to eat the different colors depending on what the card needs you to have. The Gardener cards allow you to score points on how high and how many a certain color of bamboo you need to grow. And finally the Tile cards, making them set up in a shape and a color to get you the points needed to win.

There is also a Deluxe Edition of the game as well and it's giant. It has giant pieces and everything but it will cost you $300 dollars but it's a collector's piece for sure for those who like collecting those games.

Takenoko is a fun game that surprised me and my gaming buddies with such a unique set of rules and what you have to do to win the game. The pieces are beautiful and the game is simple, yet challenging at the same time. Pandas need the love and this game really delivers and everyone should at least give this game a go with family and friends alike!  

Y2Jant Reviews: Marvel Legendary

Let me start off by saying this: I'm not a huge fan of comics in general. Granted, my favorite superhero would be Batman and after that, you have your DC Heroes and your Marvel Heroes. There's a game that released last year that takes board gaming to a new level and that is Marvel Legendary.

Marvel Legendary is a deckbuilding game where you have your superheroes from the Marvel World battling against some of the most well known villains. Before I continue, a deckbuilding game is a game that uses cards. You first start off with your standard deck of cards and you use them to buy better, more stronger cards. With Legendary, you have to buy the superheroes you want to use to battle against the henchmen, villains and finally, the mastermind to beat the game. If you take a look at the card themselves, you will see what you have to deal with.

Deadpool is one of the many heroes you can choose from in the game to build the Hero deck, where you draw five heroes and place them on the board to see if you have enough to buy him to add him to your deck. You look at the number at the bottom right hand corner and see if you have enough recruit points to buy him. You continue to do this while taking out the villains. Take a look at the board for example:

As you can see, there's a lot going on. You have the city, where the villains will appear and move to the left to try to escape the city. Schemes are a way to add a bit of a story for what you have to prevent. The big one has to be the Mastermind and that depends on who you will go for. Red Skull, Magneto, Dr. Doom and Loki will try to defeat you and the superheroes by causing damage and you guessed it, taking over the world. Your job is to have enough attack to defeat the Mastermind five times and that's how you win the game.

For $60.00, there's a lot in the box. You get at least 500 cards and boy, there's just a lot of cards. You get to pick from 15 different heroes and from there, you get your pick from different villains, henchmen and everything else in the box. Granted, when you have a 5 person game, you pick how many of the heroes will be in this game. Each hero comes with 14 cards, so that's about 210 cards for just the heroes alone!

Marvel Legendary is a deckbuilding game that offers a lot right out of the box and it already has two expansions that adds even more cards: Dark City and the Fantastic Four Expansions, nearing the total amount of cards to over 950 cards! Now that's a lot of cards! That only means that you have a wider selection of heroes to choose from and a bigger range of villains to face. At first it might be a learning experience, Legendary is just that: a superhero game filled with epic proportions.