Publishing magazines

In 📔 Magazine you lead a publishing company. You have to follow leads, develop them into stories and write articles to gather reputation and become the best of the best. The game is very simple: I was actually surprised how simple it is compared to the box size. It’s mainly about set collection and matching icons to cards to reap benefits.

Each round begins by picking player order, with later players getting better rewards. 

Then you mostly have two choices each turn: Either grab a story tile, paying money for it, or use one of your tokens in worker-placement fashion to either activate the immediate effect of a card, or to claim it for your tableau (where it will give end of round bonuses until the end of the game). 

Story tiles come out facedown, and you only get to flip them over if the current round is in the matching season. No one wants to read your article about ice cream shops in the winter after all. 🙂 Story tiles come with 1 of 5 different symbols, which you need to trigger the effects of cards. You want many of the same symbols that match your cards because symbols multiply the bonuses, but it’s also worth it to get sets of 5 different symbols, because each set increases the amount of cards you can have. 

So that's it pretty much: 👉Get money to get tiles, to have symbols to get more money and reputation. The more cards in your tableau, the more money and reputation you can generate. You play over 6 rounds and check who has the most reputation after a bit of end game scoring. 🏆

💭Unfortunately, Magazine didn’t convince us. One issue is the randomness of the drawn tiles and cards. Especially with 2 players, it can easily happen that the available story symbols are useless to you, or that whatever you need just doesn’t appear - with hate drafting this could get even worse. But, ok, I could even live with that, if the game would be more engaging. The cherry on top is that some cards with more interesting special effects are completely removed in 2p games which further simplifies the game. 😞 I wish that they had given a bit more thought to the gameplay, because the game looks absolutely beautiful!