Author: Nate Anderson

Enlarge / A hand in Mystic Vale. In the upper left sit the advancements for purchase, sorted by strength (most powerful in the top row, weakest in bottom row) along with the always-available Fertile Soil cards. To the right are the vale cards, purchased not with mana but with nature symbols. At the bottom is my deck of cards. In this hand, I have stopped after revealing three spoil symbols (the red trees). I add up the symbols on all cards except the "on deck card" atop my pile and find that I have 6 mana (blue orbs), 4 victory points (blue shields), and two green plus one yellow symbols. (credit: Nate Anderson)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

The land has fallen under a blight, and the only way for the four Druid clans to gain power from Gaia and restore balance to the Valley of Life is through the time-honored ritual of... adding up blue mana spheres on the cards before you and spending them to buy more cards with more mana spheres. And, sometimes, victory points.

Look—don't ask too many questions about the theme. Mystic Vale is a game about healing the land in the same way that Splendor is a game about crafting diamond rings for the nobility. Both titles are essentially pure efficiency engines; build up a pool of resources that will allow you to buy more expensive resources faster than anyone else at the table and you win. There are no extraneous mechanics here to distract from the dopamine drip-drip-drip of steadily increasing card combos, and Mystic Vale has learned the key lesson of these kinds of games: don't overstay your welcome.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

From Shadows over Camelot to Ticket to Ride to Mystery of the Abbey (complete with tiny tin bell), Days of Wonder has put out some richly thematic games often set long ago or far away. Its last title, Five Tribes, was a turn toward more puzzle-y games, but even it was set in the world of the Arabian Nights.

So new title Quadropolis, from French designer François Gandon, is something of an anomaly: a puzzle-style city builder set in contemporary Eurmerica. Can Days of Wonder keep its streak of hits alive?

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

Richard Garfield, the mad genius behind complex games like Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, has seen renewed success in the last few years with family-oriented titles like the terrific monster-fest King of Tokyo and its sequel, King of New York. So it's perhaps not surprising that Garfield has gotten even lighter and more chaotic with his new board game, Greedy, Greedy Goblins, which ditches turns altogether.

You, as one of the titular goblins, are encouraged to delve deeply into the eight mines open at the start of every round. Gameplay is simple enough: pick a tile from the pool in the center of the table and place it facedown on any one of the mines. Then pick up another tile and repeat. Meanwhile, everyone else at the table does the same simultaneously (and as quickly or slowly as they like), so mines steadily fill with hidden monsters, treasures, and explosives. When you wish to claim a mine, simply play one of your three goblin tokens on it; no one can add any further tiles. Once all mines are claimed, the tiles get flipped over and their effects are applied to whoever owns that mine. Gain enough gold coins across multiple rounds and you win.

It's Memorial Day, all Ars staff is off, and we're grateful for it (running a site remains tough work). But on a normal Monday, inevitably we'd continue to monitor the world of ISPs—especially how the major players handle big data users. Our Nate Anderson looked at the economic side of the decision in July 2010, and we're resurfacing his piece for your holiday reading pleasure.

Just over a year ago, Time Warner Cable rolled out an experiment in several cities: monthly data limits for Internet usage that ranged from 5GB to 40GB. Data costs money, and consumers would need to start paying their fair share; the experiment seemed to promise an end to the all-you-can-eat Internet buffet at which contented consumers had stuffed themselves for a decade. Food analogies were embraced by the company, with COO Landel Hobbs saying at the time, "When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?"

In the middle of the controversy, TWC boss Glenn Britt told BusinessWeek something similar, though with less edible imagery. "We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business," he said. "We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension."

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

While the worldwide board-gaming community has plenty of awards ceremonies, arguably the most important is still the "Spiel des Jahres" (Game of the Year) award issued by Germany's game critics. Past winners have included everything from Catan to Qwirkle, and winning one of the coveted trophies ensures solid sales and (very occasionally) fame and fortune.

This week, the Spiel des Jahres jury released its list of finalists (German) for the main "Spiel des Jahres" prize, which is always family friendly, and the newer "Kennerspiel" award for more complex/advanced games. (We won't cover the prize for children's titles, the "Kinderspiel," but the finalists in that category are Leo miss zum Friseur, Mmm!, and the children's version of the worker placement classic Stone Age.) While the winners won't be picked until July, any of these titles would make a great gift for the board game lover in your life, and the list provides a good starting point for exploring the terrific titles from the past year.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

Who knew being locked in a room would become so popular?

"Escape rooms" are so hot that even my sleepy Chicago suburb has one. Just plop down 30 bucks, and you too can be locked for an hour inside a foam-stone medieval "dungeon" located right next to a butcher shop. Each group of ten guests has to find a way out of the room before the hour expires. This generally involves solving cooperative puzzles, parsing clues, figuring out a mystery, and popping open a giant lock.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

Looking at the box for Star Wars: Rebellion, the massive new two-to-four-player galactic board game from Fantasy Flight, I had only one thought: "Look at the size of that thing!"

Loosely based on the 1998 video game of the same name, the board game version of Rebellion is ludicrously outsized. The galaxy, too large to fit on a single game board, here sprawls across two. Rebel and Imperial forces aren't represented by cardboard but by 153 plastic miniatures—including three Death Stars and two Super Star Destroyers.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think. This review contains NO SPOILERS of the Pandemic Legacy experience.

Pandemic Legacy is, at this writing, the best board game ever made. That's not my judgment—it represents the collective wisdom of Board Game Geek users, who have catalogued more than 82,000 games and have rated Pandemic Legacy the best of the lot.

That's high praise for a game that only appeared a few months ago at the end of 2015. So what makes it so remarkable?

(video link)

My smoke detectors were dying, with a scheduled end-of-life date of 2016. Because I'm the kind of person who over-researches even the best kind of hangers to use in his closet, this provided the opportunity to do something more than run down to the hardware store and pick up a couple of screamin' cheapies as replacements.

Instead, I would find and purchase the Best Smoke Detector Ever.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

Admit it: you would secretly love to launch a private army to Mars. Luckily, Mission: Red Planet lets you do so as part of a steampunk Victorian mining conglomerate. Along the way, you'll sabotage the rockets carrying other astronauts, redirect opponents' ships to unimportant patches of Martian soil, take over Phobos, and just generally run riot in your quest to exploit the Red Planet's hidden resources.

To do this, each player gets nine role cards. The roles each grant a set of specific moves, such as placing three astronauts on the same docked rocket ("Travel Agent") or placing one astronaut in a rocket and then killing another player's astronaut on Mars and then moving three of your own astronauts down from Phobos onto the Red Planet itself ("Soldier"). Other roles let you destroy docked ships ("Saboteur"), force not-yet-full ships to launch early ("Secret Agent"), or change the destination of a rocket even in flight ("Pilot").