There’s a mole behind enemy lines
TOPOUM
Designer: Perepau Llistosella | Publisher: Looping Games
PLAYED
Topoum offers a somewhat bizarre thematic meld, combining the horrors of the First World War with moles. Players control competing armies of moles on the cratered battlefields of the Western Front, popping up out of molehills, flinging bombs and vying for territory. What this boils down to is a mostly card-driven abstract where you score by making lines between two of your pieces and frustrating your opponents’ attempts to do the same.
At the start of the game you’ll choose a suite of seven action cards from a selection of twenty-two – the manual suggests some combinations that work well together, which stops this decision becoming too paralysing on your first few playthroughs. These cover simple actions like attacking a mole in an adjacent hex, attacking a mole at range, or even blowing up a hex altogether. Players take two cards in hand, then five more get dealt out in a common marketplace, where taking cards from further along the line costs you victory points (or ‘medals’, as the game would have it). The artwork and layout of the board are both great quality, with clear symbology and wooden mole meeples representing your troops. The marriage between theme and mechanics is an uneasy one, for sure – when a theme works well, it adds depth and emotional investment while helping players’ intuitive understanding of the rules.