#two-player

#two-player

Whoever plays the highest card in the led suit wins the trick. Their card stays face-up and gives it value as strength in that territory. The loser flips their wolf card over, turning it into a lone wolf worth only a single strength. All is not lost; you also get a scar token, which adds a special ability or extra scoring opportunity for you.

I was already a fan of Mandala, a tense 2019 abstract game that sees its competitors tactically placing colored sand cards in a mimic of an ancient and sacred ritual. Thus, I was eager to try its sequel, Patterns, another small-box 20-minute game, where two players are tasked with manipulating colored sand tokens as part of an ancient and sacred ritual and... who am I kidding. This is essentially a pure abstract game where colored tokens are strategically moved about a grid

Full disclosure: I have never played a game produced by the Game Crafter until now. For the uninitiated, the Game Crafter is a print-on-demand game publishing company i.e., they will produce whatever game designers send them, for a fee, without questioning game quality. Their components have a solid reputation, but as for the games themselves, well, there's always a chance you find a gem, akin to Andy Weir's self-published novel The Martian. Or you might be disappointed by a mess that clearly needed further playtesting.

Line of Fire: Burnt Moon offers a new direction for the Osprey Games product line, focusing on deckbuilding in a head-to-head battle over the moon of Io.