12I am a bit belated in writing my Kennerspiel des Jahres (KDJ) follow up, following up on my original post about the Spiel des Jahres nominees. And I must admit, part of that lateness is due to me being pretty disappointed in the nominees. I’ve written many time before how there are always great games among these nominees, and in fact I own nominees or winners from the last 5 years. So to see this year’s slate and not have any of them sound compelling is a bit of a let down. Perhaps, understandably, 2020 was not a great year for games. At a certain level I wonder if publishers held back any games simply due to the world situation. It was not a great time to market a game due to the lack of conventions that typically debut a game with a splash. It was also not a great time to sell games when folks were stuck at home away from their gaming group and likely without an audience to play them with.

In a nod to the fact that board games were mostly virtual this last year one of the nominees Lost Ruins of Arnak is available on Board Game Arena to play online. For this reason it is the one game of the three nominees that I have tried. But also for this reason, because I don’t love online games, it didn’t make the best first impression. Lost Ruins of Arnak is a very well produced game about exploring ancient ruins, think Indiana Jones. It uses deck building, and old favorite mechanism of mine and worker placement, a less favorite mechanism. Essentially you have two explorer pawns that you place on different ruins sites to get resources, in addition to your deck which also generates resources and the icons used to travel to the different sites with your pawns. The game has gotten a lot of buzz because of the synergies you can create between these two systems, and how well balanced they are. But playing online it all felt like a lot of solitaire resource management and conversion, and it was not terribly exciting. Let me explain. The game has a three tiered system of artifacts. Gems are better than arrowheads, and arrowheads are better than scrolls. You need these resources to defeat monsters that come out when exploring new sites, and to move up your tokens on a research track on the right side of the board. The experience of playing the game online mostly felt like filling out recipes of different resources to do something… not terribly exciting. I could write a whole blog about how much I hate “tracks” in games. There is very little that is exciting about moving a token further along a track, unless that ALSO allows you to do more interesting things in the core of the game. An abilities track that lets you feel more and more powerful? I’m totally on board. A scoring track that lets you get more and more points… that can leave me feeling cold. There is some unlock of abilities here as moving the research track gets you assistants that provide additional powers. But these powers are… often just more resources. Not terribly exciting.

I will give it another try in person, as I think these solitaire games are the worst online. The only interaction between players is taking the sites that they wanted to explore with their pawns, or racing up the track more efficiently to get more points. It is a game where I could walk away for the other three players’ turns and not miss much. When it’s online it is doubly easy to do so as there isn’t a live player sitting across from me narrating their turn. This also makes it more difficult to learn as I am not watching the players build these synergistic combos that make the game exciting. It is worth another shot but this is not a way I’d recommend playing it.

Another game that was nominated continues the theme of cooperative games being nominated this year, with 50% of all 6 games falling into that category. Paleo has players trying to survive as cavemen overcoming dangerous obstacles together. The unique approach here is that all players have their own deck of hazards that they are trying to tackle. This removes a common complaint about cooperative games where one player can “quarterback” other players’ turns and dictate what they should do. There is still a good spirit of cooperation however as players can always use their action to help another player tackle their challenge. The game has 7 levels of challenges to work through and some fantastic if overproduced components to give it a great look on the table. The main criticism levelled at the publisher is that the caveman characters that represent players in the game are utterly whitewashed, despite that not being historically accurate or remotely inclusive to a growing board game audience. To their credit the publisher has heard this criticism and plans to address it in any future printings of the game. This is yet another sign that euro-centric board games are becoming less and less acceptable in the hobby. I haven’t tried Paleo but would be happy to give it a shot and explore the unique player deck approach.

The final game that was nominated is a bit of a technicality, in several different ways. Because it is a German award the KDJ focuses on games released in Germany. Fantasy Realms was released in German in 2020, but actually hit the US market in 2017. In that sense it’s not new and exciting for US audiences, and in fact doesn’t appear to even be in print over here. It is kind of the reverse situation of the currently Germany only Robinhood game nominated for the regular Spiel Des Jahres. The other technicality is that the game doesn’t really seem complex enough for the description of the KDJ, which is “expert game of the year.” In Fantasy Realms you are trying to build a combo-tastic hand of cards to score the most points. Each card has conditions for when it scores, and requires other cards in your hand to score the most points. A Queen for example scores if you have Kingdom cards, and a Knight might score for having other enemy cards to slay. The gameplay is dirt simple with players drawing one card a turn or discarding one card a turn. The only wrinkle is that players can draw from each other’s discards, which is also the only point of interaction in the game, as players try to pay attention to what each other is doing and avoid discarding cards that might help another player’s combo. The scoring of the game can take about as long as the game itself as players need to walk through the conditions on each card to see how it scored points. I am honestly curious to try this one, but it doesn’t seem like it has enough complexity to qualify for this tier of the award. I suppose it’s not terribly family friendly as the scoring and combos get into the weeds a bit, and definitely scratch more of that expert gamer itch, but with the simple gameplay I am surprised to find it nominated here.

If I had to pick a winner I would guess that Lost Ruins of Arnak will take the prize. However, while I will give that one another shot, and wouldn’t pass up a play of the other two, I am not really excited by any of them. Perhaps it was just a bad, year, or maybe my tastes are changing, but it is a bummer to not have a shining star from these nominees.

I was first drawn to Under Falling Skies during the beginning of lockdown. Board games with friends looked increasingly unlikely given the circumstances, so I looked into a few solo games to try to pass the time, and maybe get away from the screen a bit. One that caught my eye was the original version of Under Falling Skies. Designed from a sort of minimalist solo design competition where entrants were challenged to create a game that only required nine printed cards, Under Falling skies was designed to do a lot with very little. It was created to be printed on one double-sided sheet of paper, with a few dice and some tokens to round out the experience. The game was nominated for the best print and play award at Boardgamegeek.com in 2019, and won a lot of accolades, but then by chance the designer Tomáš Uhlíř was hired by CGE (Czech Games Edition) and the company took a chance on making this little design into a full blown commercial game. The end production is stunning and tries to make an argument for why you might want to drop $30.00 for a purely solo game. I wanted to share my first impressions as I started to dig into the game.

I must admit there is something very Zen about solo gaming. On a lovely Spring day with the birds chirping and the work day over it’s nice to set up a game and not worry about when other players are arriving, how to teach the game, or whether everyone at the table will have a good time. Solo board games are very much like solving a puzzle mano a mano vs the logic of the game itself, as I’ve written about when I first looked into the trend a few years ago. Under Falling Skies is essentially Space Invaders in board game form. There is a mothership sending attack ships towards your city in five columns and you must roll and place dice to defeat the incoming forces, excavate and create new defensive measures, and ultimately research a weapon to take out the mothership before it blows you up ala Independence Day. 

In more detail, you roll five dice on a turn and place them on a room in one of the five columns. The rooms do one of three things: Research the weapon to destroy the mothership, send air strikes to destroy incoming attackers,  or generate power to do either of these things. The brilliant push and pull here is that while higher dice rolls are always better for any of these actions, any alien ship in the corresponding column moves that many spaces towards your city. So if you want to place that six you rolled you have to also accept that the attackers that much closer to landing a hit on your city. Too many of these hits and it’s game over. To counteract this you can place dice in a column as anti-air defense, which subtracts one from how many spaces the enemy ships move. This can be a bit of a war of attrition but plays into another puzzle-y aspect of the game. Incoming ships can only be destroyed by your airstrikes if they land on attack spaces in the sky. So often die placement is a calculation not only of how it benefits you on the ground, but where the enemies end up in the skies. A perfectly timed anti-air die can position that pesky invader just in the right spot to kill multiple ships at once which is incredibly satisfying. Finally you can place a die further underground to move an excavator and unlock new and better rooms for your defense. It is all a giant balancing act and one heck of a brain burner.

To add another wrinkle to this, of your five dice three are grey and two are white. Whenever you place a white die you reroll all remaining dice. This gives flexibility but also adds a timing puzzle on top of the rest. This makes it an excellent solo game, plenty of tension from the impending doom of  attackers and the mothership, the push and pull of powerful dice hurtling enemies ever closer toward your city, and knowing when to use your re-rolls. Additionally the “turn” of the mothership is simple to follow making it not feel like you are playing two different games at once. The advanced game even offers robot dice which will continue activating a room but degrading by one each turn. A four or five die robot is great for a few turns but once it degrades to a one or two it almost becomes a liability as it occupies the space. It is yet another wrinkle to puzzle through in each play of the game.

For additional variability there are four levels of difficulty, and various different cities to play as, each with a unique power. That alone would be plenty but CGE has gone out of their way to pack the box full of replayability. There is a whole campaign with new boards, new gameplay and comics to tell a branching story. As a game launched during the peak of COVID lockdown Winter, Under Falling Skies was primed to be a puzzle that could take months to explore. Ok, so they definitely give you enough game in the box to justify the price, but what do I think?

Well… that’s tricky. I have recently been playing a lot of thematic games like Stationfall which I wrote about last week. I also played my copy of Pax Renaissance solo the other week to test it out, literally playing two hands at once to test out the rules. Under Falling Skies is a more elegant design than either of these games. But with all the puzzling, it did feel a bit like a game of pure calculation. Don’t get me wrong, when you pull of a turn where you blow up three enemy ships in the sky it is an incredible feeling, but it is still not a game that generates stories quite like the games I’ve been playing recently. There is sure to me more story in the box as I dig into the campaign, but a campaign framing the core game can sometimes feel like narrative scaffolding versus the emergent stories that come from some of my favorite games. With that said, I am happy to explore Under Falling Skies more, and I do want to dig into all of the content they’ve put in the box. Part of that is to get my thirty dollar investment back, but otherwise if I am feeling like playing something particularly puzzle-y and Zen I might pull this game out. It’s certainly a beautiful production with gorgeous art, neat plastic ships and tons of variability. But as the world opens up and there are hints of lockdown ending, I am honestly more eager to get to gaming in person again. Perhaps solo gaming is just not for me, but I admire what Under Falling Skies is trying to do.

Our ticket off this doomed space station had just walked out the airlock. For some reason the escape pods on this ship require an NDA to activate, most likely because of the sensitive experiments that happen aboard. Some of those sensitive experiments can be heard in the metal containment cell near the bio lab. Meanwhile the head engineer just triggered self destruct meaning that in another 5 minutes everyone on board will be an antimatter explosion firework for his environmental cause. But the joke is on him because one of the maintenance clones just enacted sweet revenge, knocking the engineer out and dragging his body to the only escape pod that doesn’t require an NDA; the one for medical emergencies.

These are the stories generated by just one game of Stationfall  Ion Game Designs latest Kickstarter project. I had the privilege to playtest the game twice in one evening and couldn’t wait to write about my experience. This is by far Ion’s most approachable game yet. For one, it doesn’t have the deep historical or scientific themes that are the Hallmark of their other games. While these games are also great for generating stories as I’ve written about before, the themes can certainly feel dry to some.  But here Ion has a brilliant pitch calling this the party game for serious gamers. What could that possibly mean? After playing it, I have seen the light. Just like a party game, you might not really care who ultimately wins, just that everyone has a good time. But the tools to build stories like the ones above seem nearly limitless. So while it is a game about having a laugh, there is some amazing depth to the mechanics here.

The designer Matt Eklund describes the game as Tactical Intrigue, which… is not a genre that exists, but I can understand the challenge, and why he might have made this label up. Stationfall is a difficult game to categorize. Unlike most Kickstarter projects where it fits into a clean category based on games that came before, this game is a strange animal. The basic setup is this: Players are a character aboard a space station that is going to crash into the atmosphere in 15 minutes. Every minute is one turn in the game, and players are trying to accomplish their characters unique goals before the crash. Some of these are noble, like the Station Chief who wants to go down with the ship and make sure their crewmates escape. Some of these are not so noble, like the engineer who wants to explode the antimatter engine aboard the ship to make an environmental example. Anywhere from one to nine players can join in the chaos and many of the goals are directly counter to each other. There are more than just the player’s characters aboard, however. After all, it takes a whole crew to run a space station. Players also have a secondary objective rescue or doom on of these other characters.

But here’s the rub, no one knows who is what character, and everybody can control ANY given character on their turn. Next to the board all of the characters in a particular game are laid face up and players can place influence cubes on any one of them. Once they have influence over a character they can activate them as long as they have as many or more cubes as everyone else. What ends up happening is that players manipulate many of the different characters in the game to accomplish their goals. After all there’s only fifteen minutes and so much to do!

That secret identity aspect gave me pause, and was one of the reasons I did not initially give the game a closer look. I don’t like the genre of social deduction games where players are either good guys or traitors and a lot of the gameplay involves players arguing and lying to figure out who is on what side. Maybe it’s because people think I am lying no matter what but I often find those kinds of games stressful. But another reason Eklund made up his own genre was seemingly to avoid these comparisons. Stationfall definitely has deduction and you are trying to read the other players actions to determine their real motive. But all of the deduction is in observing their play. There is no detecting lies or community votes or any of the other hallmarks of social deduction. But it DOES have some elements of the genre, like the advantages of obfuscating your real goal, and the joy and power of a well timed reveal. You still have to pay attention to the other players to succeed.

Speaking of a well timed reveal the game rewards players for declaring what character they represent by giving them an additional very powerful ability. This creates a marvelous tug of war. It is often best to be sneaky and not let players realize who you are, but there is always a moment in the game where revealing who you are might give you just enough of an edge to pull off your grand scheme. It also stops other players from using your character and so can protect yourself from someone activating them and putting them in harm’s way. However, once your scheme is out there in the open, you better believe everyone in the game will be actively making sure it doesn’t happen, if they can.

There are many other systems to interact with as well, making a rich sandbox to experiment in. In my other game I was playing the astrochimp, an experimental monkey who was born on the space station who just wants to gather all the shiny things and get the heck out of dodge. I had gotten the secret briefcase and the mysterious artifact, but needed to round out my collection of shiny things with a gun. It was possible to print one of these but you needed officer credentials, which an experimental monkey definitely doesn’t have. However if I hacked the main computer and gave myself those credentials I would be all set. The problem was the room with access to the computer was on fire and outside it there was a cryogenically frozen man who had woken up in a bad mood and with a wrench. This is a party game for serious gamers because you are problem solving  your way through complex systems, but laughing all the way there. My monkey never got the gun or got off the ship and I ended the game with zero points. And I had a blast. The computer or digital assistant, by the way, is another character in the game, with possibly devious goals of its own.

And this is just a snapshot from two games. There are twenty seven different characters of which only a subset are in any given game. Depending on what characters are in the game and what characters players control there are countless ways this story could play out, although all of them end poorly for the space station itself. The best way I can describe it is like a chaotic improvisational episode of Deep Space Nine, minus the license and with quite a bit of added goofiness. The genre of tactical intrigue, although it doesn’t exist, makes perfect sense. Given how chaotic it is, most of your moves are tactical, and it’s difficult to plan with the chaos of the other player’s turns, especially considering that unless you have revealed your identity any other player can control the character you are most invested in. But the intrigue part makes sense as well. You are often trying to be clever or oblique with your actions so that other players don’t figure out your true intentions. The game’s inherent complexity is what gives it enough layers to have these actions remain unclear. But this game is still much more approachable than just about any other game this company has put out. It is much easier to pitch someone on a game where they might be a space chimp than one where they are a Renaissance banker. I am excitedly all in on this new design, and now the challenge will be waiting the six plus months to get a physical copy to play in person. If the stories above intrigue you I highly recommend taking a look.

It seems like every modern game is designed to be the last game you will ever need. A desert island game, an endless buffet, a bottomless ocean of content. Each game is sold to buyers with this promise that if you buy it you and your friends will never be bored and never really have to move on to another game. This occurred to me as the big box of Railroad Ink Challenge I had backed on Kickstarter at the beginning of lockdown arrived in the mail this week. This is a giant box designed to hold four individual games, each of which includes its own thematic expansions, plus a box of 7 more expansions and 2 larger maps to play on. Suddenly I am drowning in dice and have more ways to play Railroad Ink than I’d ever imagined. And if I am being honest, I am not sure I will even play every aspect in this box one time. Of course, I am hopeful. I have grand visions of me and my friends laughing around a table and playing game after game of it, discovering each expansion like a box of chocolates. But here’s the catch. Everyone else has an endless buffet of their own to get to the table. It is very rare, and certainly unpredictable to guess what game will get ten or even five plays in a year. Will Railroad Ink be the one that my group keeps turning back to week in and week out? I kind of doubt it.

It’s possible that this is all exacerbated by COVID. There is a long queue of new games, acquired when there weren’t any game nights to play them, waiting to get their chance in the sun. Shiny things from Kickstarter campaigns keep showing up in the mail, new games keep hitting the shelves, there is an onslaught of great games as I wrote about before. What is the point of an endless buffet if the furthest most people get is the appetizers, and then they ask for the check? I wrote early on that my shelves were full of memories, each game reminding me of a time it was played and the fun I’d had with friends. But now the shelf is mostly a wall of potential experiences versus real ones. As a result, the urge is to skip along the surface of each game like a stone on a lake, touch each game, maybe getting a learning game or two in, but never actually dive in with any depth. It seems counter to what the games were designed for, and I pine for the classics that I wrote about last week. Games that show the entire realm of possibilities on the first play, but which hold up to countless plays.

I admit, it’s a weird rainy day and I might be getting overly philosophical about the whole thing. There are more games than ever, and they are designed to be more replayble than ever, so what is the problem? A shelf full of potential should be exciting, especially as game nights become a thing again and all those games start hitting the table. Isn’t it strange to ask a game to be less? Well, yes and no. I think it’s best to illustrate what I’m grumping about with a bit of an example. A game that I have managed to get to the table, and finish is My City which I wrote about recently. This is a legacy style game where you play through 8 chapters, 24 games in total and you are done with the experience. The game is thirty five dollars, but can often be found cheaper and adds one or two new things a chapter over time. By the time I was done, I had had enough My City for a lifetime and I don’t really need to play it again. 

By comparison a game recently went up on Kickstarter called My Father’s Work. For ninety nine dollars this game offers three scenarios, an app driven story with each scenario having a small novel’s worth of writing, a  spiralbound village board that changes based on your decisions, and bespoke components, right down to little glass bottles with real removable corks. The Kickstarter page writes about how you can play through the same scenario multiple times and still not see all that’s in the box. On the one hand, that sounds amazing. On the other, will I even get this to the table 24 times? It’s not exactly a fair comparison, and I know that. The games are completely different in terms of play style and length. But the price is getting steeper. Ninety nine dollars is more than a lot of people would spend on a board game and keeps this particular game out of reach for some. And honestly this price is not a lot compared to other bottomless games where you can spend 150, 200 or even 300 dollars to get all of the content, like the recent Monster Hunter Kickstarter that tops out at $295 before shipping. That includes two base games and four expansions, which you can buy without having even played the game one time

I am not naïve, and I understand the sales pitch. Kickstarter campaigns are all about wish fulfillment. To keep up with the joneses a board game campaign has to convince you that it will wax your car and toast your bread, or at the very least it needs to promise that it will have enough game to last you forever. I have watched the model evolve from its infancy in 2012 to the slick marketing blitz that it is today and I see how the gears turn. My question is why does a game need to be bottomless versus just being good and affordable? If My Father’s Work came out with one scenario, some good old fashioned wooden cubes and meeples and still had the cool spiral bound map, would it be an inferior experience? That sounds like a wonderful 60 dollar game and maybe if I did feel it was played out I would buy an expansion in a few years to mix things up. But this is the old model. The new board game market is made of ruthless and weaponized desire. Renegade will sell you the game and two expansions up front, but only if you catch the hype now. For those of us who are on the hype train, and have the disposable income to spare, maybe this is all gravy. But I do feel like we are rapidly becoming a luxury hobby for the rich, and we are leaving a whole audience behind with this format.

On a different note it is a telling twist that the number one requested feature for My Father’s Work is a solo mode; a way to play it alone. These games are so big and so bottomless that its audience is demanding a way to play it without having to worry about getting a group of friends together. This trend was accelerated by COVID of course, as recent conditions have made it literally impossible to get a group together. But it started before then and puts a ceiling on any game that doesn’t have it as there is a whole audience who will not buy a game unless they know they can play it solo. I am not personally into solo gaming, but I also don’t mean to shame it. If that is how you prefer to play games, more power to you. But if there is an audience who is craving solo modes just to remove another barrier to getting the game played, perhaps there is a different underlying problem altogether. 

Who knows, perhaps I will someday be stuck on a desert island with one of these games and I will be thankful that they are endless. Railroad Ink Challenge does have a solo mode and it might be a nice thing to play over a cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe I’ll explore the depths of all those dice yet.

Designer Cole Wehrle lives a dual life. By day he designs and develops games for Leder Games with candy sweet fantasy themes that have serious depth and teeth hiding just below the surface. Root for example is an adorable woodland war game that has cats that represent the German war machine, birds that capture old monarchies and the Woodland Alliance that captures  revolt and guerilla warfare. But sure enough most people see the adorable wooden cats and are eager to sign up for a complex war game with considerable rules overhead.

By night however Wehrle runs Wherlegig Games with his brother Drew. In these games the themes are deeply rooted in real world events in history. In particular Wehrle’s historical focus is the various messes created by colonialism, and more importantly the “why” behind how those historical situations evolved. There are no cute meeples here, and none of the peanuts-esque art of Kyle Ferrin to lure folks in. I can tell you that it is much harder to sell someone on playing Pax Pamir 2nd edition about The Great Game in Afghanistan than pulling them into Root. My partner keeps asking to learn the latter and has expressed negative interest in ever trying the former.

But these games are worth playing, even if the theme sounds like a college history class you didn’t sign up for. For one thing, they expose parts of world history that are barely a footnote in most folks’ education. The most exposure I ever had to The Great Game, where Great Britain and Russia used Afghanistan as a site for a proxy war between enormous imperial powers, was in reading the novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling. You might know him as the guy who wrote The Jungle Book. But here in Pax Pamir 2nd edition is a literal simulation of what happened, and more importantly, why. Unlike reading a dry textbook in that aforementioned college class, you play a game and see the strategic reasons why historical events occurred.

While the theme is not exciting the production of these games is no slouch. For what it lacks in enticing woodland meeples Pax Pamir makes up in spades with a cloth map and beautiful resin coalition markers. Wherlegig has found an audience for these niche games on kickstarter that has enabled them to produce top of the line games for a relatively small market.

The next on the docket for Wehrle’s night operation is John Company 2nd Edition which is on Kickstarter now. It is a game about collectively running the British East India Company together with up to 6 players. Here again is a dive into a topic I know almost nothing about. I mostly remember the British East India company as a footnote to the Boston Tea Party  that everyone in the U.S. learns about during class on The Revolutionary War. But it was a major force and is responsible for a lot of the terrible toll of colonialism in India in the service of prestige in London and turning a profit. It’s an uncomfortable role ultimately to put players into. In Pax Pamir you were somewhat empowered as tribes who are manipulating the imperial powers, but here, while you do have power, you are definitely not the good guy. However, in order to win the game you have to wheel and deal and exploit the various nations in India. In order to win you will need to understand the actual why of what happened during history.

John Company is first and foremost a negotiation game. Players are working together to run one company, but only one player wins. In this way it is a sort of semi-cooperative game. The lens that the game sees this through is family. Each player takes on the role of a prominent family and your individual playing pieces are little unique wooden portrait tokens. The game plays with all the other suspects of empire and trade games: power, money, stocks, ships and armies. But it’s approach to focus on the families that drove all of those other aspects is fascinating. And in fact, you use those family members as the main way to win the game. Each turn a family has children which are then invested into various aspects of the company. Yes it’s weird to talk about investing children, but as a game built around family, your children are literally a resource to use to gain the upper hand in the company. You may have them become investors holding shares in the company or send them of to India as trade clerks hoping for a promotion, or have them join the military as an officer hoping to become a general. Everything is about using your family members effectively to make sure you run certain aspects of the company or are at least in a position to benefit the most from its success. And everything on the table is up for negotiation, including your family’s children who you can trade as wards to other players.

In recent history there have been some monumental blunders by publishers in the board game industry that have kind of swept away the negative impacts of colonialism. GMT’s debacle with The Scramble for Africa highlighted the focus on power fantasy first without consideration of the consequences of those actions. Shifting the focus from empire to the human element that drove the East India Company gives the game a more insightful view of the machinations of colonialism. This human element also gives the game an almost satirical slant as well, if not a cynical view of the affair. All of the hell caused in India boils down to prestige and retiring well in London, true to the actual historical actors. You may give your son Nathaniel as a ward to another family for a vote that will keep you in control of the prime minister in order to set your other family member up to retire to a castle from his director of trade position. There is no purity at winning this game as it invites you to roleplay the corruption in its very mechanics. All of Cole’s historical moonlighting shares this commonality of placing the player in the morass of very messy history. And I personally cannot wait to sink in and learn more about the East India Company than I ever knew before. The game is pricey at $80 on the Kickstarter campaign, but it costs less than a college course or text book on the same subject and could possibly teach you more if you  are someone who learns by doing. If such a dry theme is not for you, then Wehrle’s day fair may be much more up your alley, although each game hides depth for days; cute woodland animal or not.