Cloudspire

Cloudspire is a tower defense and area control hybrid where you’re building spires, deploying units, and managing an automarch system that plays your figures for you in combat, and the first thing I have to say is that it’s a genuinely rough teach. There’s a lot of little rule detail and exceptions clustered around faction abilities specifically, enough that I didn’t feel like I actually understood my faction until two full games in. Once it clicks though, the flow is smooth, and I’ve mostly stuck to the solo scenarios, which are their own puzzle with multiple valid approaches and real replay value baked into how differently each attempt can go wrong.

Some of the automarch decisions read as a little too gamey once you notice them, I had a leader get picked off because immobile leaders on my side couldn’t move while an opponent’s could, a rules asymmetry that felt more like an oversight than a design choice the first time it happened to me. Tile draws can also swing a session hard, some pulls are just duds and there’s not much you can do about it beyond accepting the variance as part of the puzzle.

Where this earns the four stars is the iconography and the components, both genuinely excellent, and the sheer amount of game in the box, solo, 1v1, 1v1v1, 2v2, co-op, each mode changes what you’re actually optimizing for. It’s fiddly enough that rules mistakes are basically inevitable at my table, we catch one almost every session, but it’s the kind of fiddly I keep coming back to rather than the kind that wears me down.