Roux Dat: Back from Dallas (ANTS, Last Lantern, First Giants)

We’re back from a short Memorial Day weekend trip to Dallas. The main reason was to visit Jack, our son who we lost to the great state of Texas three years ago after he graduated from college. And since Dallas that weekend every year is the home of BGG Spring, it made sense to take the trip. 

Unfortunately, our busy schedule in Dallas left no time to actually attend BGG Spring, even if we had a blast attending with all of our friends back in 2023. Instead, we hit the country dance halls every night, toured two museums (the Raimundo de Madrazo exhibit at the Meadows Museum on the campus of SMU is a can’t miss!), ate some fantastic BBQ brisket at Oak’d, grabbed some of the best Mexican dishes we’ve had in Texas at Josè, and of course, played a ton of Tipperary with Jack and Stephanie. 

While we were there, we did stop in again at Common Grounds, a fantastic FLGS not farm from Josè. What a selection! I was hoping that they had a copy of First Giants, and not only did they have tons of copies, but they were including the free Hobby Next promo pack with the upgraded first player token and bonus set of newspaper scoring tiles. 

Speaking of First Giants, Jeremy from the Acadiana Board Gamers (and Jeremy’s Gaming Gratons), came over for a post-Dallas game night, and we immediately played it. I had already played a two-player game with SneauxBunny, who really enjoyed the breezy nature of the game, so the rules were fresh in my mind. First Giants is Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert’s re-imagining of their gem, Elysium. 

The hook in Elysium, besides the various Greek god families and their special powers, was the delicious decision of how to build your little engine and when to tear it apart. Cards that you draft — through an ingenious drafting system using colored totems — can grant you special powers to boost your gameplay, but only if they aren’t in your scoring area. Once they are moved into scoring position, their abilities are turned off. Plus, it’s an evil little game, because not only are there vicious fights over the cards themselves, but if you are not careful, you can really back yourself into a corner by leaving yourself just one colored totem that doesn’t match any available cards on the board. So delicious!

Enough about Elysium, what about First Giants? Three big changes: the playtime is cut in half to about 20-30 minutes (for a two player game), you no longer use colored totems to choose cards, and the entire game is themed around putting together a top notch dinosaur exhibit. Players each have four tokens, and use those to choose one of four available card slots (each with two cards to choose). Players cannot block each other out (a big difference from Elysium), but by choosing a slot, that slot is not available to that player until they use the “pick up” action. For the most part, the rest of the game plays pretty much like Elyisum — grab cards, get one time bonuses or special powers, move them into your museum display to score points for families of Dino types or Dino sizes, and try to hold onto the newspaper scoring tokens. 

The pick up action is smoothly done. When you pick up your tokens, you decide for each one whether it gives you one amber (the coin in this game) or one museum action (the way to move your Dino cards into your display). Timing that pick up action is a tense little decision, especially as you get closer to the end of the game. I love the production of the game — it’s a tiny box, in the style of Devir’s crunchy euro boxes like The White Castle so the inclusion of three themed bit boxes is very helpful — but I’m very curious why they designed player boards that don’t fit neatly into the box. Strange! I’m really .. ahem … digging First Giants, and unlike most people that have interacted with me on social media, I’m starting to think I can let go of Elysium and just play First Giants instead. 

Next up, Jeremy and I broke out Last Lantern, an interesting little cooperative game from WWBG from Taiwan. This game had made my GEN CON 2025 preview list, but it had a little trouble getting a wide release so I had not seen it in the wild. WWBG was kind enough to send a copy. The forest is in danger, and players have to use polyomino pieces to wind their way to the edge of the forest to gather lanterns that can beat back the evil fog. 

It’s tougher than it sounds. Players are silently choosing which tiles and which meeples they will gather each round, and are hoping not to step on each other’s choices (because then they have to share like good little woodland creatures do). Any tiles not chosen are placed on a track that spells doom if the track ever fills out. Add to that tension is the bag building element, where light and dark fireflies are pulled from a bag to be placed on any spots behind the lanterns that players could not fill out with the geometric pieces. Pull four fireflies — which happened to me and Jeremy right near the end of the game — and the players collectively lose that way, too. 

I heard that it was a real challenge to win, even in the base game, and it was. But the game ratchets up with “secret” modules that can be played out of a brown envelope in the box. The production of the game is gorgeous, with beautiful art and very cute little firefly and other creature meeples. Those meeples are key — the fireflies will keep you in the game or sink you, and collecting one of each of the different woodland meeples gives you access to powerful one time bonuses the are probably the key to winning. Definitely playing this one again.

Finally, we topped off the night with a game of ANTS from Cranio Creations. This is the follow up to one of our favorite recent euro games, Rats of Wistar.. Ants seems to share the same universe and art style, and has some complementary mechanics, but is designed by two different designers from the original. After only one play, I was very impressed with this version. 

Players are building an ant colony, using a twist on the original power up mechanics. Instead of a wheel with rats that shows you the actions, players always have access to six different actions, but three of them are wholly dependent on the number of ants that are in that column. Managing those ant columns are tricky, because baby ants are born in the “incubation stage” (basically the refresh action) and then move to larvae and finally ants as the game progresses. Ants must be fed, too, so you can’t forget about building some food engine on your player board or from card play.

Like Rats, ANTS seems to reward smart card play. You start out with a hand of four cards and a player board, and the next thing you know, the playmat is filled with a line of cards all giving different points and bonuses, or even better, triggers a cascade of end game scoring points. Oh man, I enjoyed this game. The only thing missing was the exploration of the house that I really enjoyed from Rats of Wistar, but in every other way, this felt like a smoother, combo-wambo laden experience. I don’t have a copy, but I’d love to play it again especially with a three player count. I think it would sing at three players. 

So that’s a wrap on our trip to Dallas and some excellent gaming when we came back. Now, the Summer of Mitchell has begun, so I’m hoping to get him over to the Gumbo Pot try some new games that 25th Century sent including VNTYPL8S and The First Tsar: Ivan the Terrible. Plus, we also have to rib each other about our terrible SdJ nomination picks.

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

** Some of the games above were provided to us by the publishers. **