The best thing about Heroquest

 

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The thing we most often come across is that a lot of games don’t really shine with just two players. Especially when an AI is added, chances are big that it’s not going to work out well. Having a lot of games in our collection, it’s really fine – there are enough other games that we can play that work well with just two players or are even designed for it. But it does mean that some of our favorite games aren’t played as often as we’d like.

A game that does score very well on play counts is Gloomhaven – and finally – after 29 sessions, my character Tony Spark the Tinkerer has retired! I’ve been level 9 for quite a while now and honestly, the game was getting too easy for our merry band of adventurers. With another one of the characters probably retiring the next session, it will completely change the dynamics of the game and that’ll be interesting!

And out of the blue, our BGG secret Santa sent us a message that our gift was ready for pickup! Wooh! After solving a little puzzle, we had the code to pick it up at a local game store. And we got Western Legends and The Mind! Our Santa has spoiled us again this year. 🙂 The Mind we had played before, but we’re happy to own a copy now because it’s just such a fun little game. We’ve also played Western Legends this weekend and the game is much lighter than we thought! We expected a heavier running around the board game, but it turns out to be quite a light sandbox game! And that was quite a nice surprise. It goes up to six players and it’s really something we could play with a bigger group on game nights on a weekday.

Yesterday, we early-celebrated Heinze’s birthday and our younger nephews also visited, so they had a go at our HABA games! We also tweeted a bit about that yesterday. 😀

Since it’s still Cyber Monday, we also have a sale going on in our merchandise store! If you’re looking for some fun Semi Co-op/board gaming apparel, notebooks or bags and would like to support us in the meantime – check it out! 🙂

Being in a board game couple means…?

 

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Undaunted was kindly provided by Osprey Games for free. We thank them for giving us this game which led to this comic! For more information on how we deal with gifted games, please see our FAQ!

Undaunted is a super interesting strategy deckbuilding game about WW2 with some really thematic game mechanics like the ones mentioned in the comic. The game comes with twelve different scenarios for players to play, making it a game that is easy to start playing and it will gradually introduce new cards and abilities to players.
With all the new games that have come to our collection, we haven’t had a chance to play this lately, but we’re looking forward to continuing our campaign.

We did get to play a lot of new games last week, which is great! Due to being ill I missed playing Ambrosia, so I can’t tell you very much about the game, but as far as I heard – it was fun! 😉

During the weekend we also played some more games of Mental Blocks, Letter Jam, Cloaked Cats, Paranormal Detectives, It’s a Wonderful World, Getaway Driver, Head Hackers and The Binding of Isaac! We were quite proud of “our score” at the end of the week. 😀

And good news! As of this week, we’ll be uploading two sketchies every week instead of one because it’s the start of the holiday season in the United States and CoolStuffInc will be sending out an extra newsletter! After Christmas, we’ll go back to the normal schedule of one sketchie a week.

What’s your deck-builder with a twist?

 

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You’ve got so many games, you surely can miss a few of them, right? And that’s sort of true. We’re fine with people borrowing games, as long as we know who’s borrowing them and we know they’ll be careful with it. But some titles have been gone for over a year now, so it might be time for us to inquire if people would still like to play them or else return them to our shelves. 😉

Last week we had an interesting and varied gaming week! We kicked off on Tuesday by playing Mental Blocks and a game of Letter Jam. On Thursday we continued our Gloomhaven campaign (my character is soooo close to retiring and I’m looking forward to it!) and on Friday we played our first game of Pharaon. On Saturday we had planned a game day with a niece of mine and we played The Voyages of Marco Polo, Wayfinders, Valley of the Vikings and Exploding Kittens. And no, we had never played Exploding Kittens before, apparently, that is rather rare, haha.

So we’ve been doing really well playing all the new games we’ve gotten at Spiel. I believe we’ve still got eight unplayed games left. Some of these are a little harder to get on the table, but really looking forward to playing it, like Sabotage which requires exactly four players and The King’s Dilemma – which is a legacy game and we’re still figuring out who’ll want to play that with us.

My schedule doesn’t allow me to write down a first impression of every new game we’ve played, but I recommend following us on Instagram for that, we often try to write one there as well. I wish everybody a wonderful week!

Are you ok with people borrowing your games?

 

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Everdell was a big hype last year and last week and as also said in last week’s blog post – we finally played it! The setting of the game is lovely and cute, but there are a few cards that really stand out and we just needed to make a comic about it. :’-)

We didn’t play as many new games as we wanted, just three games. We’ve played PARKS and Megacity: Oceania.

Technically, it was not our first play of Megacity: Oceania, since we also played it at the UK Games Expo this year, but it was the first with our own copy. We also concluded that we liked the game better with higher player count than two players since your downtime during turns is also the moment you get to put together your pieces to build an awesome building and thus downtime is very very short with two players. We might try adding a sand-timer of 20 – 30 seconds to make sure we would both have time to actually build stuff. But probably this is a game we will play when there are friends around because we think a lot of them will really like it.

And PARKS, which was a great surprise! The production quality is top-notch and there is a lot of game in the small box it comes in. The art is magnificent and we really enjoy the attention to details like the water token that fills up the water canteens of players. We knew it was a looker, but we didn’t know the game itself was as good too. Again, like with Everdell and Wingspan, the game might not have original game mechanics but it’s just a very well executed total package that’s really fun to play. In PARKS, players each have two hikers which they will move on the hiking trail to get resources and other things to be able to visit parks in trade for those tokens. Just like in games like Tokaido, that means it will get crowded on the trail and players will start blocking each other. With two players we already found it was really possible to block the other player and we’re really curious how that is with five players and thus TEN hikers on the trail.

I’d like to conclude this blog post with a shoutout to all the new people supporting us on Patreon! Last week we had hit the 60 patrons milestone and after tweeting about that, that number increased with eight new patrons. Which is amazing. Thank you all so so much! These weekly comics would not exist without your help.

What other games look cute but have a dark side to it?
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