The Pillage

The Pillage sounds like a historical raid, and that is usually the right expectation for a game with this name: short bursts of taking, planning, and keeping control of what has been grabbed. By our assessment, that kind of idea works best when it is direct and tactical, because the whole appeal of pillaging is pressure rather than long setup. The obvious limit is that this sort of game lives or dies on how much variety it gives that basic act, since the theme itself is narrow. In play, that often means a compact loop and a lot of focus on local decisions instead of broad systems. It sits in a small corner of strategy or action design, and the name does most of the heavy lifting before the rules do.