A webcomic about board games and other geeky things.

Consumer Hypocrisy

December 4, 2017 Rachel 5 Comments

Check out the video review of Raptor by No Pun Included! And note: we really love Food Chain Magnate! 😀

So we’ve finally played Great Western Trail…! Sort of. We started playing, loved it, but there was this weird snowballing effect going on with Heinze’s score and the train and that’s when we discovered that we overlooked one of the rules that you have to place one of your workers on a station spot after claiming the bonus tile. We had no choice but to stop playing at that point because the ‘damage’ was done. We did really enjoy all the gameplay elements and can’t wait to try Great Western Trail again!

Yesterday was Heinze’s birthday and although I actually managed to gift him non-boardgame related things (such a challenge!!), he did, of course, get some games. We now own Raptor and Jaipur! Both very fine games. We’ve played Raptor yesterday and that game is hard and fun! Since it plays so quickly, you can easily play it multiple times in a row. But you can always just check the video by No Pun Included that is mentioned above. We can’t wait to try Jaipur tonight. Since we’re both very busy lately we haven’t had the time to play longer games, so it’s great to have a few more short games to play in the evening with a cup of tea.

For the people who don’t follow us on other channels, we’ve published another video last week. We’re huge fans Blade Runner 2049 and the baseline test just screamed to be Semi Co-op’ed. And so we did. 😉

The golden Standees 2017 – Information

Like mentioned last week, it’s almost time to present our third edition of the Golden Standees Awards! And like last year, we would like to offer you a chance to contribute an award! That means we will certainly share your award on our social media accounts and that there is a chance you’ll be published on our website. You don’t have to be an artist to participate! We’re just looking for fun awards and we all know that a simple stick figure drawing can be funny (for example, XKCD!). Or take a cool picture. Everything is welcome. So if there is a game, publisher, game designer, website, YouTube channel you would like to award, this is your chance! Remember that we are looking for ‘funny’ awards, not just an award for “The Best Board Game YouTube Channel”, etc.

We offer you a *.PNG , a *.PSD template and the font that’s being used. You can download the files here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f9xybby0wq891id/AAByA6g63GRHvx6PMd7B6RQga?dl=0

The final deadline for contributing your own award is December 29th 2017 and you can send it to goldenstandees@semicoop.com.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a message. If you don’t have any experience with graphics software, but you do have an amazing idea for an award and want to draw it on paper – that’s fine too! You can just scan your drawing and mention your award name and the winner and we’ll make a fancy Golden Standee for you. If you want to do this, I do advise you to download and print an image of the Golden Standee from the URL above to make sure you are using the right dimensions.

We can’t wait to see what creative ideas you come up with!
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Which reviewer has convinced you to buy the most games so far? 😉

Tabletop VS Couch Games!

December 11, 2017 Rachel 6 Comments

Digital and analog games aren’t that far apart and are sometimes really much alike in theme (and also in gameplay, sort of). So we have some tips if you love one of the listed games above! If you like Kitchen Rush, you’re bound to like the digital game Overcooked. It’s a hilarious frantic co-op game in which you have to prepare and serve meals as fast as possible! … Oh wait, that’s the same as Kitchen Rush, right? Correct, only without sand timers and more fire! 😉 If you like Junk Art: try Tricky Towers, a great Tetris stacking game… with physics! And if you like the never-ending storyline of Gloomhaven, Divinity is right up your alley with about 100 hours of gameplay. And you get to talk with cats and other animals.

So our BGG Secret Santa gifts have arrived, but we won’t be able to pick them up until tonight! Exciting! We can’t wait to see what we got! 😀

Do you know more digital and tabletop games that are almost the same?

Selection Process

December 18, 2017 Rachel 5 Comments

A post shared by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on Dec 17, 2017 at 3:47am PST

Our gift from our Board Game Geek Secret Santa arrived last week and oh my… IT’S CHARTERSTONE and The Game Extreme. We’re actually not familiar with The Game, but the first time we played it, it became immediately clear that it is a very challenging little co-op card game – great fun! We’d like to thank our Secret Santa once again: thank you for the amazing gifts.

But let’s get back to the beautiful white box. Right now it’s just displayed in our house for us to stare at it and we are cracking our brains over when we’re going to play it and with who. We probably want to finish Pandemic Legacy Season 2 first and then get started with this beauty.

We’ve been on a roll with Arkham Horror the Card Game last week! We’ve played the first four scenarios of the Dunwich Legacy campaign and we are loving it. Our team of investigators does seem to be a little overpowered though. The combination of Rex Murphy and Zoey Samaras is just devastating. Rex finds clues very very easily and monsters almost perish at the sight of Zoey. We’ll probably try this campaign again with other investigators and see how it goes then. 🙂 But first, we have two more scenarios to go and we probably have to wait a while for the last scenario pack since it seems to be out of stock everywhere.

What game are you hoping to get from Santa this Christmas? 😀

PS. Don’t forget that you can submit your own Golden Standee for our People’s Choice awards! More information on how to submit in this blogpost.

The Golden Standees 2017

December 25, 2017 Rachel No Comments

2017 is almost over, so it’s time for our third annual GOLDEN STANDEES! The award show where we give out very niche awards to things we enjoyed this year. If you curious about the previous winners take a look the 2015 and 2016 editions.

We wish you all happy holidays and an epic New Year with lot’s of good times, but don’t forget next week…

the People’s choice golden standees!

We would love to see what games or which content creator you think should be given a golden standee! On Twitter, we’ve had some fun discussions about awards, but it isn’t real until you’ve submitted it! We will share all awards on our social media accounts and make a selection to be published on the website. Don’t be afraid if you feel like you are not “creative” or don’t have art skills! We’re looking to have fun and we all know that a simple stick figure drawings can be just as funny as a great cartoon. You can also take a cool picture, everything is welcome. Remember that we are looking for ‘funny’ awards, not the award for “Board Game of the Year”, etc.

We offer you a *.PNG , a *.PSD template and the font that’s being used. You can download the files here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f9xybby0wq891id/AAByA6g63GRHvx6PMd7B6RQga?dl=0

The final deadline for contributing your own award is December 29th 2017 and you can send it to goldenstandees@semicoop.com.

We can’t wait to see what creative ideas you come up with!

We have some free time the coming weeks so we’ll be playing more Legacy of Dragonholt together, which just decided to crank up the intensity and slap us in the face about a wrong decision. We will also have some gaming sessions with friends playing Eldritch Horror (does that game ever get old?) and Pandemic Legacy Season 2. Behind the scenes we’re also planning for 2018 which will have a ton of great Semi Co-op things for you to enjoy!

Do you have great gaming related plans for 2018?

The Golden Standees 2017 – People’s Choice!

January 1, 2018 Rachel 5 Comments

HAPPY NEW YEAR! May the dice rolls be in your favor in 2018!

2017 has come to an end, and so we present your part two of the Golden Standees: The People’s Choice awards! Contributed by readers and we asked Colin and Aileen from TinyWoodenPieces to make an award and they did an amazing job! It’s great to see them in action again. <3 We would like to thank all of our readers for the fantastic past year. We can’t wait to get started with 2018 since we have a lot of great ideas we want to explore and present to you and the world.

A post shared by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on Dec 31, 2017 at 12:43pm PST

What are your gaming goals for 2018?

Catdemic Legacy

January 8, 2018 Rachel 12 Comments

With the Golden Standees behind us, it’s time for ‘normal’ comics again!

We’ve started Pandemic Legacy Season 2 and won the January game – a good start of the game! … And then we played February, which started out amazing for us but soon turned into an avalanche of horrific outbreaks. We obviously didn’t win, but we’ll have our revenge soon. We’re really loving the game so far, it’s different from Season 1 in a very interesting and challenging game. We’re really curious what’s going to happen further on in the game. 🙂

We’re trying to finish some campaign games we have laying around which we’re just playing with the two of us. Finishing Legacy of Dragonholt felt good and we’ve paused our Arkham Horror LCG campaign in absence of the last scenario pack and so we decided it’s time to finish Mechs vs. Minions. We’re now down to the final mission! Which is looking like it will take us a few tries before we can beat it. After we’ve finished Mechs vs Minions it’s time for us the finally start playing the Tail Feathers campaign. And we still need to figure out with who we want to play Charterstone or if we want to play it with just the two of us, but we’re not sure if we’ll get a full game experience with just two players.

Summing it up: we’ve been playing Mechs vs Minions, Pandemic Legacy Season 2, Kingdomino, Mysterium and Battlecon! Quite a varied menu of board games if I say so myself!

What game would certainly improve with the addition of some animal characters? 😉

Achievement unlocked!

January 15, 2018 Rachel 5 Comments

A post shared by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on Jan 12, 2018 at 1:44pm PST

… The things we do in ~~life~~, eh, mostly board gaming! If you’d make a list, you would be impressed by how awesome you must be! 😉

Last week went by in a flash! We didn’t play too many board games, only The Networks, Biblios and Elder Sign. Oh and yesterday on the train we played a game of Pandemic on a tablet, which we won! … barely. 😀 While the world was spinning into utter chaos and with our outbreak counter on 7, we just managed to cure the last disease. Ignoring most of the cubes and just go for exchanging cards and curing the diseases might not have been our best strategy. 😀

And our game of Elder Sign went just terribly last week. We both were incapable of throwing whatever we needed. For example: even after spending four clue tokens on four dice – the dice just refused to give us a scroll icon. After that and every room in the museum holding a terrible monster, we just quit the game. The Elder Gods just managed to curse our dice that night. We’ll have our revenge one day.

What games offer some pretty great goals for on this achievement list?

Clever girl…

January 22, 2018 Rachel 5 Comments

Raptor totally deserves its own comic. And yes, we did utter the words ‘Clever girl’ from Jurassic Park multiple times during the first few times we played the game.

A post shared by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on Jan 20, 2018 at 3:03pm PST

We’ve been playing a ton of games last week! We continued our Pandemic Legacy Season 2 campaign and it’s getting exciting! We’ve had a glorious victory in March and we are now dreading April and we are 100% certain it will be impossible to win and are going to focus on damage control.

Also, we’ve started with the biggest game I’ve ever seen. GLOOMHAVEN! The amount of content in the box is simply intimidating and I wonder if we’ll ever be able to finish it, but for now: it’s fun! And we’re going to try and tackle the second scenario tomorrow. It feels like an entire fantasy RPG game like Neverwinter Nights or Diablo… made psychical and put in a box.

BoardGameGeek has been targeted by DDOS attacks lately and we sincerely hope that whoever is doing it, will stop doing so. It has a great impact on all the people who just try to provide an online space for people sharing their interest and love for board games. It of course also affects the members, but I can’t imagine how it must be for the people who try to keep the site running. All the luck to them!

Are there any movie quotes that you like to use during certain games? 😉

Farmer Talk

January 29, 2018 Rachel 3 Comments

A post shared by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on Jan 27, 2018 at 7:57am PST

One of the beauties of board games is that they can give us insight into different worlds, whether it’s fictional or not. You have to think about things and situations you’d never have given any thought… like farming! 😉 It could also raise ethical questions and discussions on a more serious tone like in This War of Mine, a game that will make you think about what you would do in a certain situation?

Not much news in our board gaming lifes. We continued with Gloomhaven and lost the second scenario AND discovered that we were playing the game on ‘very hard’ in stead of normal. Whoops! We messed up with the enemy stats. We dialed it back to ‘hard’ for now, but we might just play on normal from now on. Since this game is so big, we don’t want to have to replay scenarios all the time because it was just a little too hard. It has to be enjoyable to play as well. 😉

This Saturday we helped two of our friends move in together and it turned out that their combined board game collection was a little bigger than they had anticipated. They might need to get rid of some games or arrange extra shelve space! Formula D and Descent are still missing in this picture.

What board game gave you interesting insight into something you would never have given any thought to?

Wild Dice

February 5, 2018 Rachel 5 Comments

A post shared by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on Feb 4, 2018 at 10:11am PST

Whooooooh, this week’s comic is the 150th comic that has been published! Crazy! I almost can’t believe our archives have grown that big already! And I can still say that we’ve published a new comic every week, we’ve never failed that statement on top of this website. Our next milestone is our 3 year anniversary! Which will be accompanied by one of the interesting things we have planned for this year.

So at the UK Games Expo, we’ve scheduled a session of Crystal Heart with Eran from UpToFourPlayers.com and the awesome people from BehindTheBox! Crystal Heart is set in the world of Savage Worlds RPG and it has different mechanics from traditional DnD. If you’d like to know more, you should definitely check out the Crystal Hearts comic by UT4P or look up Savage Worlds. We can’t wait for the UKGE and we really went to the store to get ourselves some awesome looking dice for this special upcoming occasion. 😉 I just love having a reason to get more dice, it’s a weakness! We might not have bought as many as in this comic though.

(And yes, those dice in the third panel are drawn, I wish there was a filter I could have applied to a picture to make it just look like that, but alas! It does look pretty though if I might say so myself.)

Do you prefer expressive, colorful dice or a matching set of simple solid dice?