Driving home from work takes me, depending on traffic, 15 to 20 minutes. For more than half of this route, we were complaining about War of the Ring: The Card Game. We had just finished playing it, and we were airing our grievances. I was complaining about its randomness. Marek agreed that the cards were very situational—powerful in certain combinations, but useless in others. I was whining that the scaling was quite weird, and the variants for 2, 3, and 4 players all had many small different rules. And Marek dared to complain about the balance right after the first playthrough—said it was off, and that the Fellowship of the Ring felt much more powerful in a 3-player game.

I was turning into my street when Marek said he’d love to play it again. I said I couldn’t wait to play again as well.

Nothing works in this game. The mechanics based on k20 dice, just like the famous Dungeons & Dragons, completely fails on every step in this case. Contested rolls are ridiculous, attacking your opponent is extremely risky, and duels are so random that it would make more sense to take a deck of regular cards and play War. The balance of available spells doesn’t exist. If you put me on a scene, I would start roasting Frostgrave for an hour, and I wouldn’t list even half of the problems I have with this game. 

Also, I have to mention I’ve played it eight times already, I bought six expansions, and last weekend I also bought a second army so that I could play two campaigns simultaneously, cause one campaign is just not enough! I’m hopelessly in love with Frostgrave.

It’s an excellent game. It has everything the WWII board game should have. It has small miniatures of tanks, small trucks, mortars, and all the other little toy soldiers we love. It has dice and uses a good chunk of them; when your Sherman fires, you take 10 dice in your hands and you throw them on the table.

The rules are simple and yet give so many tactical choices. In your round, you can activate any of your 3 units. With 20+ units on the table, it is pure joy. Use your mortar to slow down tanks. Move out with the Saper unit from the dangerous position. Risk and charge with your Flamethrower team. You need to do everything, but you have only 3 activations, and then your opponent plays.

Heat is one of the best racing board games I have played. And let me pair this statement with another one: I am a sucker for racing games, and I played a lot of them. When I say the game is great, I really mean it.

It has a simple and brilliant heat mechanism that forces us to think desperately about what to do before each turn and curve. It’s a small deck – our valuable resource. How much do you want to burn it this time, how many cards from this deck may you risk discarding this time? With this one rule, designers Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen created the best board gaming equation: maximum player excitement achieved with minimum rules complexity. 

Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything. You heard this a thousand times already. You nod, you agree, but let’s face it – do you really understand it? Do you know what exactly it means?

I’ll give you an example. It’s called Mille Fiori. It’s been done by Reiner Knizia.

Mille Fiori has no single new idea in it. It’s a well done family eurogame. Each year hundreds of games like that are published in Germany. Most likely Reiner designed it during a lunch break, between his other bigger projects. It’s a simple play a card, put your piece on a board and score points. There are 4 unique areas on the board, therefore four unique ways of scoring. There is literally nothing new. I bet, and I am dead serious, most of you could play the game without reading a rulebook. I’ll give you your cards, your pieces, and you’d start playing.