Robinson Crusoe is a survival-themed game about staying alive on a tropical island as shipwrecked survivors. I’m a big fan of survival video games, so it stands to reason that I’d also enjoy a survival board game, and as it turns out, I do.
Even the most laid-back groups are going to contend with tough encounters sooner or later. The rotation of moderate, low, and severe combats, with a pinch of trivial and extreme encounters, is incredibly important to the feel of a game. Encountering an Ogre might make you poop your pants at level 1, but at level 6? The Ogre does the pooping because you can take on more than one of them fairly easily.
To my great shame, I slept on Gloomhaven for the longest time. I had seen people call it DnD or Pathfinder without a GM, and that meant I had no interest in it. I already play Pathfinder, I don’t need a cut-down board game version. After playing Jaws of The Lion, I would like to find all these people and club them with a 600-page core rulebook for being wrong and leading me astray.
Gears Tactics convinced me that pretty much every videogame IP should get the X-COM treatment. Halo, Death Stranding, The Elder Scrolls, all of it. It’s incredibly fascinating to take an existing game and watch all of its mechanics translate into a tactical turn-based version of itself.