The Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos is a fertile ground for game themes, although Unspeakable Words may be one of the oddest adaptations. Given that it was designed by Cheapass Games impresario James Ernest and former TSR/Hasbro (Avalon Hill) lead Mike Selinker, this may not be a complete surprise. 

At its heart, UW is a Scrabble-like word forming game, using cards instead of tiles and a board. Each player — the game supports up to 6 out of the box, with more theoretically easy to add — is dealt seven cards, each with one letter on it. On your turn, use the cards in your hand to make a word of at least three letters, then draw back up to seven cards. No word can be used twice in a game (so it’s useful to keep track), and the usual restrictions on proper names, abbreviations, contractions, and the rest apply. If you can’t make a word you must discard your hand and draw a new one, passing your turn.

Seems simple enough, but then it gets strange. As in Scrabble, each letter is worth a number of points; however, this score is based on how many angles are in the letter, not on its frequency in the English language (which instead determines their frequency in the deck). So round letters like O and U are worth zero, while fellow yet more angular vowels E and I are worth four and the very triangular A is a whopping five (the highest value, shared with its neighbor B). The object is to be the first to score 100 points… and stay sane.

Like most Cthulhu-inspired games, UW has a sanity mechanic. Every time you score a word, you roll a d20. If you roll equal to or higher than your word’s score, you’re safe (for now); fail and you lose one of your five starting Cthulhu pawns (or if you prefer a more thematic mechanic, you gain one). Fail five times and you become a gibbering mess and are eliminated. Rolling a  20 will earn success no matter how high your word’s score is, so there’s always a chance to survive. Fortunately you still score for the word even if it cracks your sanity — unless you fail the “sanity check” on the word that gets you to 100, in which case you not only get close to insanity, but you also score zero points on that particular word! 

There are a few variants included in the rules to keep games fresh, but the game is fast enough (and wacky enough) to never really outstay its welcome. Since it’s really more of a filler game there isn’t a ton of strategy other than when to press your luck with a huge-scoring word, but with word games like this the real fun comes from exercising your vocabulary. The cards are high-quality and shouldn’t need sleeving even with frequent play, and the Cthulhu pawns are cute in their own little twisted fashion. You can pick up Unspeakable Words, published by Playroom Entertainment, for $18.90 at Amazon and less than $25 at most gaming stores.

Back when I reviewed FITS, I mentioned that it took the “multiplayer Tetris” title away from Blokus. It later occurred to me that I haven’t covered Blokus in this column. Let me correct that oversight now.

Based on a design by Bernard Tavitian and published by various companies over its lifetime (currently in the hands of Mattel here in the States), Blokus is an award-winning abstract strategy game for up to four players featuring a 20 x 20 game board and four sets of 21 tiles ranging from a simple 1×1 cube to various pentominoes.

Each player takes one of the colors of tiles and begins by placing any tile they choose on the corner of the board nearest them. On each subsequent turn, you have to place one of your remaining tiles in such a way that it only touches your other pieces on corners (and it has to touch at least one) — no adjacent sides allowed. That restriction only applies to your own pieces, however; it’s perfectly legal — and often sound strategy — to place your pieces alongside those of your opponents. This is especially true if you can block off avenues of play by occupying key corners or making it impossible for certain pieces to be played in a given space. Everyone has the same assortment of tiles, so it’s important to keep track of what they have left to play.

If you have no legal plays, you are eliminated. Play continues until either everyone is eliminated or everyone left playing has played their 21st tile. Scoring works as follows: you lose one point for every square of your remaining tiles (5 points for every unplayed pentomino, 4 for every leftover tetromino, etc.). If you managed to play all of your tiles, you instead gain 15 points; playing your 1×1 tile (which is always legal somewhere on the board unless you were blocked off like crazy) last is worth an additional 5 points. Of course, if one player is able to place all of his tiles and nobody else can then the winner is sort of obvious. 

What makes Blokus such a solid offering is the quick yet strategic play. Even given the propensity for analysis paralysis early on when you have a wide array of options at your disposal, late game plays are often quite constrained. A typical game of Blokus should be finished in under half an hour. Blokus accommodates from two to four players, although the awkward mechanics for three players makes this less desirable than two or four; two players each have two colors of tiles and alternate between them as they place, with like-colored tiles still only touching at the corners but no restrictions on placing your two different colors adjacently. There are also variants for team and solo play.

Blokus really shines as a family game, as there is no reading and very little math required, so children as young as five should be able to play. As long as they’re old enough to not put the gem-like tiles in their mouths (since the smaller ones are choking hazards) they should be fine. You should be able to pick it up for less than $30 just about anywhere. 

The third and final expansion for Tom Lehmann’s Race for the Galaxy card game, The Brink of War adds an entirely new mechanic to the normal world-claiming and development: prestige. Prestige is a sort of currency, a hybrid between the game’s victory points and goods. You normally earn prestige by adding specific cards to your tableau, although there are a large number of powers that can generate it as well. 

Of course, one of the advantages of having a lot of prestige is simply that you could become the Prestige Leader. After every phase, players check to see if one has more prestige than everybody else; if so, that player becomes the Prestige Leader and places any prestige earned that phase (and any subsequent phase in which is is Leader) on the Prestige Leader tile. At the end of the round, before new phases are selected, if the Prestige Leader has one or more prestige on the tile, he earns one VP and draws a card; if he does not have any prestige on the tile (e.g., he just retained Leader without increasing his prestige) then he simply gains one VP. If one or more players is tied for Leader (with at least one prestige each), they each get one VP instead. Due to the free VP doled out by the Leader mechanic, games played with The Brink of War have an additional 5VP in their starting pool beyond the usual 12 VP per player.

The other major addition to the game is the Search/Prestige action. Once per game, each player may use their Search/Prestige card instead of selecting a phase normally. If they choose the prestige option, they pay one prestige and then earn an additional bonus to whatever phase they would normally have chosen; this bonus is in addition to the bonus they receive for selecting that phase. If they choose to search, there are nine categories of card for which they may go digging: a development that gives +1 or +2 military, any military windfall world of strength 1 or 2, any normal windfall world of cost 1 or 2, any world with the “uplift” chromosome symbol, any world that can produce “alien” goods, any variable-point 6-cost development, any world with a military strength of 5+, any card that is capable of consuming two or more goods, or any card with a takeover power (either offensive or defensive). Before any phases are resolved, the search actions happen (in homeworld order if necessary) by revealing cards from the top of the deck until a card that meets the search criteria is found; the searching player may either take that card (putting the rest face-down on the discard pile) or ignore it until they find a second such card, which they must take. If the deck becomes exhausted without finding a valid card, the search fails and the player retains his Search/Prestige action for later use.

The Search action is just one way the game compensates for the ever-growing size of the deck. With all three expansions, the deck has doubled in size from the core game’s 114 to 228. As a result, there are a lot of additional Explore powers littered throughout the newer cards, as well as a new “draw and discard” power that helps players cycle through their options. All of this card filtering comes at a small price, however, as games played with The Brink of War usually take about ten minutes longer than an average Race for the Galaxy game, at least while players are getting used to the new options.

The Brink of War is a fitting conclusion for the Race for the Galaxy story, and the addition of the prestige gives the game an extra dimension that makes it feel like a more “complete” game overall. While the base set is still just as playable today as it was when it was first introduced (and is still how newcomers should first experience the game), the gradual evolution of the game over the last three expansions has been quite rewarding for those of us who have been along for the ride.

In Stefan Feld’s Notre Dame, published by Rio Grande Games, each player represents an influential Parisian noble looking to rise to the top of the social ladder by gaining prestige. Each player begins with three gold coins and four influence markers, plus nine action cards and their “trusted friend” pawn. Ten additional influence cubes per player are also included in a general supply for future use.   

The titular cathedral sits in the middle of the modular game board, assembled from 3-5 identical boroughs (one per player, with two players using two “dummy” districts in the four-player configuration) radiating outward like a flower. Within each borough are seven districts, five markets, a carriage, and a harbor. The four outer markets each contain one of four message tokens, distributed randomly at setup. Finally, each player places their black “rat cube” on the plague track located in their borough’s harbor.

The game consists of three periods of three rounds each (or nine total rounds). At the start of each round, three personality cards are revealed: two from the six-card brown deck that will be recycled each period, and one from the gray deck that will be gone through only once per game. The personalities in the gray deck are divided according to period so their abilities are more appropriate for their respective stages of the game. Each cards has from zero to three rat icons on the bottom, which indicates how far each player’s plague track will advance at the end of the round (more on that later).

Once the personalities for the round are known, each player randomly draws three of his action cards and selects one, then passing the other two to the player on his left. Each player then selects one of these two cards and passes the final card to the player on his left once more. Only two actions are taken each round, so the third card is hidden behind the second when it is played so players aren’t completely sure which actions have appeared in the period. At the end of each period all of the action cards are returned to their owners to begin the process again.

Each of the action cards represents one of the districts in the players’ boroughs, plus two additional cards. Most of the boroughs’ actions allow a player to place one of the influence cubes from his personal supply (or from a different district if he has none in his supply) on to it for a reward that scales with the number of influence markers on it. The first time one of these cards is used, the player receives the bonus at 1x (one coin, one cube from the general supply, one prestige point); each subsequent time the reward increases accordingly (two cubes = two coins/cubes/points, three cubes = three, etc.). The carriage house works along similar lines, with the number of market-to-market moves being indicated by the amount of influence on the district; however, only one message can be collected with each activation, and players must accumulate a message of each player’s color before they can collect a second one of that color (and must accumulate two of each before a third; if there are no more messages of a given color then they must complete their set as best as possible before moving on). The hospital district will reduce the number of rats gained at the end of the round by the amount of influence on it, in addition to moving the plague track one space each time a cube is placed on it. The park district also moves the plague track back one space whenever a cube is placed on it, but every two cubes on it also bestows an extra prestige point every time a player earns any, which can be quite powerful over the course of the game. The hotel district earns one coin, cube, or space on the plague track whenever a cube is placed on it; once the district has accumulated at least four cubes the player earns two of those rewards, but the hotel is still usually a last-resort option barring other strategic desciions. The only card not tied to a district is the “trusted friend” card, which acts as a free-roaming influence cube that can be placed anywhere within the borough (and must move off his current district when played in subsequent rounds). Finally, each player also has a Notre Dame card; playing this card allows the player to pay from one to three coins to earn 1, 3, or 6 prestige points and place one cube on Notre Dame. At the end of the period, the number of points available from Notre Dame (which varies according to the number of players) is divided by the number of cubes on it (rounded down) and each player scores that many points for each cube he has there.

Once each player has performed two actions, they may hire one of the three personalities for the round by spending a gold coin, then increase (or decrease, if their hospital and/or personality’s ability bring the rat total below zero) their plague track accordingly. If a player’s plague track would ever pass 9, they suffer a loss of two prestige points and must sacrifice an influence marker from whichever of his districts contains the most (or of his choice amongst tied districts) to the general supply. It’s also worth remembering that the plague track remains maxed out in this situation, so it is very likely that the player will suffer this penalty again unless he gets the situation under control.

By far the most defining strategic feature of Notre Dame is the mini-drafting of the actions each round. You can’t really go into a session with a pre-planned strategy in mind, as the cards you need to execute it might not come up in time or be passed to you, so you have to remain flexible and be able to find the best avenue to victory presented to you. Not knowing which personalities will appear each round (except for the final round of each period, if you’re paying attention) is a factor in this as well. The prestige points earned by each player is kept hidden (sadly, the tokens provided aren’t one-sided like the ones in Small World; usually player hide their stack under spare coins or messages, trading up for higher-values as necessary), creating the possibility for a surprise winner. A typical session of Notre Dame surprisingly plays put in under an hour, usually around 45 minutes, but it will make a lasting impression on the group in that brief time.