We are very lucky that we live in a city that has quite a big board game culture in a country that already has a big board gaming culture. We have three great board gaming stores within a half hour traveling time by bicycle and there are loads of people who love board games. We suspect the main reason is that our city has a technical university which means a lot of people have had a phase in which they played Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Warhammer or Dungeons and Dragons.

That being said, except for participating in a couple of Netrunner tournaments, we’ve never been a part of board gaming clubs as we have enough friends to fill loads of game nights. One of our friends is a member of a board game club however and the club had a board game day on Saturday so we went to try some evil strategies went to meet new people and play some fun games. We had a good time playing a three-player game of Root and a five-player game of Brian Boru. The last time we played Brian Boru was a while ago and now that we’ve played some more trick-taking games it was great to revisit it. We had a good time and the club members were very keen to make sure we felt welcome so we can recommend checking out the Order of the Dice meetups if you happen to live near Enschede, and want to hang out with some other board gamers.

While we had fun at the gaming club the main event was playing a demo copy of Neon Hope. It’s a narrative card game like the Arkham Horror LCG but it uses a more limited deck of cards per player that reminded us of Gloomhaven. This is a major advantage, for us at least, as we don’t need to build a full deck to start playing. This is something that has stopped us from getting Earthborne Rangers as we feel the commitment is a bit too much for us. Neon Hope is very different thematically though, as you play characters figuring out a big tech company’s big secret project which is situated in a cyberpunk/solarpunk version of Berlin.

We already played part of the demo at Spiel and it was probably the best thing we played while were there. Luckily, it held up and the second playthrough was still as solid. In this demo scenario, you’re trying to find a friend who wants to meet in a nightclub, so you use cards and skills to ask around, look around the dance floor, hack some surveillance cameras and fight some corporate goons that are also interested in the whereabouts of your friend. Like Arkham LCG it’s able to communicate its story through creative card design. We like that ‘corporate loyalists’ are weaker than the ‘freelance security guards’ but they are much harder to get away from.

The game is also filled with little nods to other cyberpunk universes, the club name in the scenario is called Syphon and its logo is pretty close to the Netrunner credit icon, and at one point they mention Kreuzbasar which is the name of the neighborhood you use as a base of operation in Shadowrun: Dragonfall. So we hope their upcoming Kickstarter is a success and we get to see the other four scenario’s they designed once the full game is out.