The Antediluvian Weapon

I always look forward to Daniel Stelzer's games now because they've basically become like Ryan Veeder, in that both have a good track record of consistently putting out well-polished games with interesting mechanics that are easy to finish and have a wide variety of settings.

The setup in this game is a kind of medieval alchemical heist, which made me realize several of the games in this competition have similar themes, which made me look up and discover the theme is 'archaeology'. The mechanic in the game is an object that vanishes things (discovering what that exactly means is the major crux of the game).

The map is compact, with most of it forming a 3x3 square. Elementals guard the different parts of the map, requiring some ingenuity in how to deal with them.

Overall I found the game solid and good for beginners while still being fun for experienced players (one optional puzzle was too hard for me as I hadn't experimented enough, but it was, fortunately, optional). To me the only flaw (if it can be called that) was that in my subjective opinion it stopped just short of greatness in story and mechanics. I feel like if it had just one more puzzle in the main areas and one more paragraph at the end with some kind of new interesting info or twist or hook then it would have been awesome. Even without that je ne sais quoi, it's one of the best games I've played this year.