Random Geek Child

Because what everyone has been desperately waiting for the opportunity to do is rifle through the trash and eat it, right? No? Ah, well, it makes more sense for a raccoon. In Trash Pandas, you have two objectives: succeed in the press-your-luck dice part of the game, which earns you the right to gain and stash cards, and then play and stash cards to have the most points at the end of the game. The card and dice mechanics dance together well!

In a lot of ways, the card mechanics are also a press-your-luck vibe, because cards you stash are scored by who has the most of a kind, and stashed cards are usually secret! Do you use the card for its ability or its point value? Can you afford to expend it? Is it worth the risk?

Of course, some cards have no point value. You’re unlikely to stash/eat the Kittehs and Doggos, because their only purpose is to block attempts to steal from you! And Blammos are a flat one point each, but they also let you re-roll your last die. Decisions, decisions.

Mechanics aside, this one really leans into the garbage theme! Ew, you say. Hilarious, I’d contend. The Nanners have mushrooms growing on them. The “Mmm Pie!” has a D6. All of it looks like a biohazard and a half. The artist(s) must’ve had a blast!

I’m honestly very tempted to make wine. I’m not interested in drinking it, and I think making it could be fun. And then I’d gift the bottles to Mom, who actually would drink it! Flawless system. In La Viña, the “gift” is actually the vineyard – shocking for anyone who speaks Spanish, I know – and should come with an asterisk: you and your fellow players all might inherit this vineyard, but to prevent fragmentation, only one of you gets to! So you have to prove yourself as grape- and wine-savvy to win the prize.

The general premise is that you’re moving through the vineyard, collecting grapes, and each time you exit the vineyard you can sell them to wineries – some wineries want blends, which are at least half one variety of grapes, and others want one type exclusively. Grapes have values, wineries have minimums, and you can only make deliveries with one basket at a time, which can only hold so many grapes. It’s a juggling act! Grapes sold, you get prestige, which is both currency and victory condition!

The game ends when someone has used all their barrel tokens, given to wineries each time you make a sale, and everyone else gets to finish their last pass of the vineyard. Barrels vary by number of players, as do a lot of things – basket upgrades for purchase, tools to be found, even the length of the vineyard! Which determines the amount of available grapes on a given pass, while the tools (picked up with some grapes) give you better access to cards that might be inconveniently placed. All of which makes for a very carefully weighted vine-to-wine experience!

Have you ever read Shel Silverstein’s “How Not To Have To Dry The Dishes”? It goes about how you’d expect. I remember encountering it during our fourth grade class poetry show, at just the right age to both empathize with the “consent of the governed” of it, and have a vague crisis of conscience. After all, the story goes, to not have to dry the dishes, something has to break.

I was also nine for this story, and had yet to encounter the notion that dishes could be fixed.

All of which is to say that Broken and Beautiful is a game about kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. Or silver, or platinum, but notably something shiny and obvious, marking breakage as a part of something’s story, and not the end of the bloody world.

In terms of the game, it’s gorgeously simple: get pottery! Break pottery! Fix pottery, at a cost. When you’re done collecting, score! It’s what I’m inclined to call “mechanically compact” – nearly every feature serves multiple purposes. Your candidate cards to choose from, on a given turn, are a quantity of (two per player) plus one, giving you extra options and, per the one left over, defining what type of dishes this turn are going to break. If the last card available is a cup, everyone’s cups shatter! Each different card type has a given cost to fix, which is also the gold you can sell it for when you first acquire it – no deciding later that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And given that broken items are worthless, come the end of the game, you may want to! When an item is fixed, however, it’s not only untouchable – it will never break again – it’s worth more points than it was unbroken! (It puts me in the mind of wood glue, something else that feels like poetry and isn’t quite the point. I’ll drop the link.) Flip the card over, and bask in the improvements.

‘But Cassandra,’ you might ask, ‘if the back of the card is largely identical to the front, how does the deck work?’ It’s easy! The top card’s not a secret. In fact, that top card type will also break each turn, regardless of what you do. You see what I mean? Efficient.

When there are no longer enough cards left for a proper draft, the game ends, and each type of item is scored differently. Some have different stacking bonuses with others of their type; cups’ scores are multiplied when paired with saucers; teapots gain value by what else is of the same pattern/set. And then there’s serving trays and storage boxes, wooden items that cannot break, one of which scores a flat rate and the other per your remaining gold ingots! You can see, then, why I’ve never been able to predict which of us will win a game until we stop to score. With nine distinct scoring methods – who on Earth can?

Because sometimes, the end of the world is adorable. Right? Right. It’s certainly the case in Doomlings, “a delightful card game for the end of the world”! Though, to be totally fair, the game only ends at the End of the World. It is, more accurately, about the possible courses of life on Earth! Or some unspecified, distant planet…

Doomlings is a game of populations and traits, like Evolution for amoebas. Perhaps your organism is eloquent, or warm-blooded! Each trait comes with its own bonuses and setbacks, even if they’re just opportunity costs, and make up the tapestry of a complex, hopefully well-adapted life form. Your options always stabilize per the scope of your Gene Pool, so the higher that value is, the more cards you have in hand! Your default is always playing one, but some cards have actions that let you play others, or End of the World bonuses per certain cards still in your hand.

The End of the World is, sadly, inevitable. How else would the game end? Rounds are tracked by Ages, starting with the Birth of Life and instituting different effects, some immediate and some lasting the whole Age. Eventually, you hit a Catastrophe! Catastrophes mark the ends of Eras, of which the game has three, and at the third Catastrophe, the world ends. The poor planet can only take so much. Between World’s End effects, traits’ face values, and any bonuses and modifiers, this one is very much anyone’s game right up to the end. Which is thematically on-brand! Doomlings offers a very cheerful, carefree apocalypse experience, with jokes aplenty and the doctrine that there is no secret perfect path in life. It’s sprawly and swingy and colorful in a way that brings me joy. And the fact that it’s cute sure doesn’t hurt!