What’s better than one board game? ‘Er, one board game plus a nice cup of tea?’ No. I mean that’s good, but try again. ‘One board game, a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich?’ That’s not it either, but I’m quite hungry now you mention it. ‘A board game with a cat sitting in the box while you try to set up and play?’ Again, an excellent answer, and yet somehow not the answer I was looking for.
Two board games, that’s what’s better. Don’t ever say that I don’t bring you treats.
These are the newest small box board games from the award-winning design and publishing team at Flatout Games. We’ll start with Point Galaxy, which is a follow-up to the smash hit card games Point Salad and Point City! This is a fast and fun card-drafting sequence-building set collection game for 1-5 players, and there are 140 unique planet/space cards, so you can create a completely different galaxy each and every time you play.
The rules are simple: Select any two cards from the dynamic market grid and add them to your expanding galaxy. Place planets into numeric sequences and score additional points by carefully selecting and placing suns, moons, asteroids, and wormholes. As you construct your galaxy, collect rockets and complete research projects to gain even more scoring conditions to win the game. Point Galaxy takes the same simple concept of drafting cards and building the best combinations from Point Salad and Point City, and adds new layers of sequence building and spatial puzzles to the mix, making the game both familiar and challenging. Point Galaxy features 140 unique double-sided planet/space cards – each with individual attributes and stunning artwork to help bring your galaxy to life.
Onwards to game number two. Propolis is a simple, fast, and fun worker placement and engine building game for 1-4 players! Take on the role of competing medieval bee colonies deploying worker bees and trying to build the most glorious kingdom! It’s got the feeling of a big resource management game experience in a small box that plays in just 30 minutes.
You take one of five actions in your turn – deploy, fortify, or retreat your worker bees, construct a new structure, or build a palace for your queen. As you place your worker bees out onto the floral landscape, you’ll compete for dominance in each of the rows, while collecting the resources you need to build structures. The worker placement spots appear on a dynamic market of cards, so your choices are always changing. There is also a unique area control aspect to each of the rows of cards – the player who places the most Worker Beeples wins rewards.
If you’re like me then you love a bargain, and this bargain is the real deal. You can order both games super cheap as a print and play, ideal for you crafty types. You can order one or the other on its own, but the best option here is both together. But don’t let me tell you, take a look for yourself on the crowdfunding page here.
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here.
