Spring 2025 notes

I’m no longer active on Instagram. You can find me on Mastodon, I’m [email protected]. I mostly post in Finnish about books, but now that I’ve connected with some board game people, I’ll occasionally include posts in English as well.

Innovation Ultimate. I’ve been a fan of Innovation for 15 years now. I’ve only played the base game, though: my interest in the expansions has been close to zero (I tried Echoes once in beta). When the Innovation Ultimate crowdfunding was announced, I was intrigued and soon found myself ordering seven copies (four for members of my game group, three for other people).

When the game finally arrived in March, it was time to delve into the expansions. I’ve been very happy to play lots of Innovation, more than 20 plays now, and we’ve been trying various expansions alone and combinations, too. We’ve even played a couple of games with all the expansions!

Let’s start with that: Innovation with all the expansions is crazy. We tried it once with the physical game and found it to be somewhat exhausting. It’s hard work to try and follow all the rules. We’ve since played it twice on Yucata, where it’s more convenient.

Games with one or two expansion are easier to manage. My favourite expansions are the ones that shake things a lot. I like Artifacts and Figures. I haven’t found a combination I don’t like.

The new card design looks good, and I like the changes they made in the base game. The age 11 is a hoot, and the junking mechanism that removes cards permanently from the game is nice: I like how it makes more likely for the game to get to the high ages, where the most fun is. There may be some added chaos, at least initially, but that’s what draws me to Innovation, so I’m fine with that.

Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-taking Game. Counting plays, this is my most-played game of 2025. We’ve played this three times, but since each deal is a play, it’s a total of 41 plays so far. Initially, this seemed like a fairly easy variant of The Crew. Later scenarios increased the difficulty level a bit, but this still seems a bit softer. I’ve now played twelve of the eighteen scenarios. If you like co-op trick-taking, this is worth a go.

Black Forest. The new version of Glass Road ditches the simultaneous action-selection and double-guessing element of the cards. That’s bound to be divisive, as that was something that separated Glass Road from other Rosenberg games. I was never a fan of double-guessing so I’m happy with the new action selection mechanism that is based on worker placement with just one worker.

Tom from Shut Up & Sit Down likes this game because it’s a bit fuzzy. You don’t necessarily optimize every move, but instead play from gut instinct. That’s how I feel about Black Forest, too. It’s a nice little adventure where you move between the villages, collect stuff and try to build something neat. There’s room for games like this, and I’m happy I bought Black Forest even if it felt a bit stupid now that Nooa has moved to a different city and we get to play less often.

Faraway. If you need a nice filler game that scales from two to six players without problems, here’s one for you. Players draft and play eight cards, then resolve them in backwards order. Many cards require a certain amount of symbols and only the symbols in that card and the ones played after it count. There are conflicting interests: you want to play cards in ascending order to collect bonus cards, but often it’d be better to play them in descending order.

I thought this was fine. The two-player game plays fast; maybe too fast? It’s over in just minutes. The six-player game took about 20 minutes, which is very nice for something like this. This is an enjoyable game, but I think I’ll pass my review copy to someone who likes it more – like my son.