Woodcraft

This is everything I want in a Euro game. The saw wheel is a great action selection system, giving bonuses to less used actions, making every action relevant and time-sensitive. A challenging puzzle with lots of interesting choices. The theme aids the mechanisms. Satisfying action chaining.

This game is all about splitting and "glueing" together dice and fulfill contracts. The theme is one the strongest part I saw in a game as this makes so much sense to include the dice cutting/adding mechanism in a woodcrafting theme. The action-wheel is very intuitive and easy to learn and gives you the option to choose a "less popular" action to get incentives like resources which will help you later on. That causes you to go down a different path and explore other ways to do actions and find better/faster strategies.

The game surprised me positively. He has a rondel that works very well during the game, some stronger actions are blocked and to unlock them you need to do the "weaker" ones too. Furthermore, the game has a defined number of rounds and ends super quickly, this makes the game last around 2 hours with 4 people, which I think is a very good time for the weight it has.

I really love the action wheel in this game, making the less frequent actions more and more valuable, especially so if popular actions are pushed further ahead. There are so many great options to choose between in each round and you feel like you just need that one more action to really pull off what you want to do, yet you still manage to achieve a lot. Solomode is also excellent, easy to follow, no upkeep.

*Solo Review* Information overload then some! The game NEEDS a player aid card! Some actions that you can take are not shown on the board, only in the rulebook. That's ok since you can't have every rule posted on the game itself. Something you'll need to keep in the back of your mind when playing. Once this complicated action game is understood it flows well. The learning curve is high on this one, once you start rolling you'll have no problems seeing how it runs. Give it a chance and you will be pleased.