Blood Rage (2015) Review

Rating: 7.5

Excellent miniatures and terrific art are the frosting on this game, which is a battle for glory. The unpredictable card element of a fantasy board game like Talisman is made more interesting here with a more immediate focus, multiple characters per player (leaders, warriors, sea ships, and monsters), more of a reliance upon strategy, and a board that evolves throughout the three different phases of play. Add to this the GREAT mechanic of self-sacrifice possibly working in a player's favor--and thus, a player's goals shifting mid-game or being hidden from others at first--and the resultant game has a lot of possibilities. This is not an analysis paralysis monster like Mage Knight (my favorite solitaire game alongside Thunderbolt Apache Leader), but there are often tough choices and gambles to be made.
A couple things are counterintuitive--I'd rather that warriors could not "March" to non-adjacent lands and the term "Invade" is not well chosen for landing new pieces on the board ("Invade" sounds like an action that would occur after a "March")--but these are minor quibbles.
Overall Blood Rage is a really enjoyable game that has some of the immersive qualities of far heavier games while being fast moving, unpredictable, and a very good balance of luck and strategy.
My favorite board game is Cave Evil while my girlfriend adores Pandemic, and Blood Rage is game that we both have a great time playing together. It is immediate, goal-driven fun and an engaging fantasy with lots of choices and great visuals.

Gunslinger (1982) Review

Rating: 6

Gunslinger is very, very, very detailed and tricky, but even harder to grasp because of the tiny font, triple column "rule book" (read: statistical list and chart assembly) and not "fun" as a solo experience, though it was definitely a "funny" solo experience. Like Robo Rally and Space Alert, you program a series of movies and watch bad stuff happen.

My last game, I spent about 20 minutes looking at charts and pulling out cards and cross referencing as my opponent shot me, jabbed me, and (as I tried to get up) kicked me, kicked me some more, and shot me unconscious. So it was a LOT of work to be kicked and humiliated after 30 minutes of missing my shots and trying to hide and reload ... but it was certainly a vivid experience, which means something to me.

People are divided on whether Gunslinger works as a solo game--it comes with a solo system in the original box and my current rating reflects using that system, which works well enough to kill me consistently (if not unfairly), though it did get jammed in loops a few times and required "helpful interpretation" on its behalf (so it could then kill me). I'll pull this out again some time, and I imagine with living opponents it will be more fun than it was opposite the inexorable (and sometimes illogical) A.I.

So my rating is applicable to solo plays of the original system and may change when I try it out in full and learn whether this can be "fun," but the admirable (if not overwhelming) details of aiming, aiming some more, sticking your head around a corner, loading, which hand holds the gun, the steps of reloading, the kind of bullets going in, the chance of a misfire, the type of misfire, injuries, getting staggered, falling down, etc. are neat even if it the game plays like more of simulation than a game in the solo mode.

Barbarian Prince (1981) Review

Rating: 6.75

Barbarian Prince is a small solitaire adventure that is equal parts board game, role playing game, and a choose your own adventure book. The vibe is cool and the little hex map is nifty. 

Be warned: There is a lot of bookkeeping here for a board game. Food, weight, endurance (hit points), additional NPCs, and the regular adjustments to the character stats give it an RPG vibe. Battles can be less fun however--early on I got into a super long combat situation (with my wandering monk at my side) against a regenerative troll that was about 10+ minutes of rolling the same miniature six-sided dice with modifiers changing once or twice every round as the troll healed over his halfway endurance level and was cut down again below it and he healed above it, etc. Lengthy dice rolling of wholly abstracted battles is a bit of a hurdle for me: I tend to dig lengthy battles with lots of detail (Ambush! excels here), massive scale battles with midlevel detail (D-Day at Omaha Beach) or merciless, wholly abstracted battles (Cave Evil and Blood Rage). So 10+ minutes was too much combat for a single combat that had no actual battle detail other than gaining or losing a point or two.

I do like the exploration here. That's a strength. (Though the travel flow seems wonky in that your "event" when you are "lost" takes place in the hex that you have not yet been allowed to find/enter. Huh...?) Still, like the justly praised Mage Knight, traveling and defeating anything in combat in this world are accomplishments and the small board grows larger and deeper the longer you play.

D-Day at Omaha Beach (2009) Review

Rating: 7.5

More thoughtful, tense, and enjoyable homework from game designer John H. Butterfield comes in the form of D-Day at Omaha Beach. 
The scale--in terms of moving parts--is really big for this WWII hex encounter. Often turns bring about consideration of 25 protagonists who have a wide variety of actions and a comparable number of antagonists...that is if your fellas even make it from the ocean to the beach in one piece.
There's a lot of thinking here every turn, but mental exertions do not diminish the feelings of hopelessness that beset the player at the onset of every German attack nor do they hamper the thrill of finally doing any substantial damage to the better positioned and relentless foes. 
This wargame is fun, infuriating, ingenious, and educational. And the SUPERB rulebook makes this complex game far easier to comprehend than some of its simpler peers. 
Bravo, Butterfield.

Pandemic (2008) Review

Rating: 6

A decent accounting game that reminds me of Risk, albeit in reverse. The manipulation of the infection deck is very clever (by this I mean the premature recycling mechanic), and the outbreaks do bring out the theme to some small degree, but overall, it is an ephemeral experience.
It is definitely more fun to play this abstract game as a team than solo, since interactions bring out the game's other mild thematic strength---the special skills of each character.