Roux Dat: Phoenix New Horizon, Unmatched: Stars & Stripes, and Ulm

South Louisiana has been inundated with rain storms this past week. There is nothing good about torrential rain affecting people and property, except for the fact that it does give rise to a good reason to game. If you can’t enjoy the sunshine of Acadiana, you might as well enjoy some cardboard. 

So, Doug and I met up for an usually early Saturday morning game day. We each had a stack of games to play, but there’s never enough time to play everything. Instead of playing everything, we did get a chance to put three good games on the table.

First up was Unmatched: Stars and Stripes, from Restoration Games. It’s almost time for the 200th birthday of America, so I want to get these characters to the table as much as possible during these “freedom months” of celebration. Memorial Day, Flag Day, Juneteenth, and July 4th all fall within about 45 days of each other, and if you are a patriotic person like me, it’s a wonderful time to celebrate our history. 

Doug is an experienced Unmatched player, so we were off and running as soon as we reviewed our powers. (We really should take a few minutes to read all the cards, too, before we play, just to get familiar with the combos.) He chose Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, of Tombstone fame, while I picked Rosie the Riveter and Wendy the Welder. 

My two favorite things in decks are when they let me draw more cards and when there is an opportunity for ranged weaponry, and this deck has both. The main mechanic is that Rosie (famous from the patriotic posters from WW2) wears a mech suit, which has four power-ups that you have to manage. They activate at the start of the turn, until all four are live. When that happens, the entire set goes dormant until the next turn. One of the mech’s powers is to give more cards every time you attack — and that incentives getting up close and keeping the pressure, a fun way to play — and one of the powers gives Rosie ranged abilities. I loved the Rosie deck, and so far, it has been my favorite deck. 

The Tombstone duo was designed by owner, Justin D. Jacobson, and you could tell he is a fan of the history and of the best lines from the movie. Almost every other turn, we were stopping to read the text on the card and reminiscing about who made the better Doc — Dennis Quaid or Val Kilmer? Doug lost Doc fairly early in the game, and we learned pretty quickly that keeping him around is a key to winning with this deck. It’s another excellent themed box from Restoration Games. 

Next up, we played Phoenix New Horizon from Devir Games, not once, but twice! I was never really sold on the post-apocalyptic theme during the play, although I did enjoy seeing the floppy discs and video game cartridges. But I don’t need my solid euros to have a perfect thematic setting to be fun. I just need a hook and a reason to dive in.

Phoenix New Horizon’s ‘hooks’ are pretty clever. There are three main sections of the big game board. The first is the ‘worker placement’ section, where your intrepid two-workers-and-a-grande grab spots, but the twist is that the placement spots are on levels that get better and stronger each round. The problem is that it costs a lot of fuel, the currency in the game, to shoot up the levels Donkey Kong style, and if you do, your worker gets reset at the end of the round to that same level. Plus, getting to the top not only gets you a chance at some really good end-game scoring, but it resets the worker to the bottom and gives you essentially an extra turn that round. We found that getting up there to get those extra turns during the game is a key to scoring. 

The second is an intricate track style section, where you move researchers up a spiderweb of spaces. Most of the spaces have fuel or points, but a bunch also have special actions, many of which only go to the first player to reach them. Again, running up those tracks give you access to big points at the end and lots of free stuff, so somehow you have to focus on that track, too. 

But the focus of the game is the main board, with cities spread all over the map. The cities need to be re-energized (hey, there’s that theme!), with increasingly more expensive sizes of energizers, but you also have to consider the bonus cards that you will be collecting all game. These cards give you powerful bonuses if you complete what the recipe calls for — like have a ‘pink’ and ‘green’ city anywhere, and a ‘blue’ city in the purple zone. And there’s a double reward — there are a number of public goals that will also get you powerful bonuses if you match those recipes, too. 

You obviously have to do everything in the game. You obviously can’t do everything in the game. That tension between doing what you can to do everything, all while dodging the other players attempts to take the best cards, or best worker placement spots, or best bonuses, or even best cities is addicting, and that’s we played it twice in the same day. In the second play, there were almost no rules questions, just two guys trying to maximize each turn, and that was a lot of fun. The only downside to me is the fact that it is so important to know what cities you are in and what are available to you, and it takes a lot of accounting during the game which could have been tracked on the player board but isn’t. Oh well, that’s a pretty picayune complaint for might be the best euro Devir has put out in the last few years. 

Finally, I was in the mood for a good solid beige euro, you know, the kind with a city name on it, some cool little mechanical twist, and tons of ways to score points. So, I brought Ulm with me, which just happens to be designed by the same designer who brought us Tipperary, one of the best family weight euros that have come out in a long time. 

In Ulm, players use the sliding piece puzzle mechanic that we see at restaurants and dollar stores and party favors to choose three actions each round over the course of the game (which lasts ten rounds). Players use the actions to slide a barge down the Danube River of Ulm, Germany — the birthplace of Albert Einstein, I learned recently from MapTap — and take actions on one of the two sides of the river. Players also have to take into account the round effects that come from the tile on top of the Church tower that we are building each round, a cool 3D special effect for the board. 

The actions are all fun. You can grab a special power from the powerful Descendants in the town. You could add your crest to the slide puzzle, giving you Ulm Sparrows (kind of a local currency as I recall) that help you choose better action tiles. You could move the barge down the river (you’re in the negative until you hit the beautiful bridge in the middle), or collect powerful cards to build a church or increase your market or just take special actions. This is one of those games where the winner usually grabs a strong Descendant that points to a strategy, and then hammers on that plan all game long. 

This was Doug’s first play ever, and my first play in a few years, so we didn’t maximize our ten turns, but it was a pleasure to revisit an old favorite. Ulm deserves another visit soon. 

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo