We’ve just returned from our week-long holiday in Austria this weekend, and it was great! We lucked out with the weather, and we made some awesome hikes in the Alps. And since we now own a car, we could take (more) games with us! And yes, we took too many and we only played four of them, that’s how it goes… but hey, that might have been different if it had rained a lot.

On the way to Austria, we made a stop in the German city Würfburg and that turned out to be a lovely place, and we couldn’t resist checking if there was a board game store there, and there was: the Würfel Kiste! It was a nice little store with a great selection of games, but the problem in Germany is that 98% of the games are German. However, we did find a multilingual copy of Tiger & Dragon, a game Heinze was interested in, and we took it with us as a little souvenir and because we like to support stores! It’s a shame that we learned yesterday that the store is closing by the end of this month. 🙁

So in our apartment, the first thing we played was Tiger & Dragon, and it’s a fun game. At first, we thought it kinda leaned towards a trick-taking game, but after playing two games, we realised it’s a game about timing and trying to hold on to your most valuable stones, and trying to strike at the end of the game. We enjoy it, and since it’s a short game, we’re sure it’ll get to the table quite often.

Another quick game that we really appreciate is Confusing Lands, which we played next. Of all the so-called microgames we have, this is our favourite. We have our own printed version from when you could only buy the print-and-play online, but since last year, you can get a physical copy of the game!

We also played the latest Guilty game, Guilty: Monaco 1955, and pffft, that got us beat! We must have missed something very important somewhere along the road because when we reached the conclusion, we couldn’t fit the puzzle pieces together. We did really enjoy the story and had a great time, but let’s just say that our score wasn’t that great. If you’re looking for challenging mystery cases, these Guilty boxes are a great pick.

The day after our ten-hour mountain hike, we decided to stay indoors and chill since our legs were done for and it was 32 degrees Celsius outside. We watched a movie and played a game of Parks, which I mainly took because of the theme, and I thought it would be very fitting with our surroundings, but… Either I have never tried to play this game optimally, or I have forgotten that it’s just really not that great with two players. The game has gear cards, but playing with two, you can gather a lot of resources during a round – often enough to buy two park cards (= points), while gear cards only offer a marginal advantage, so they’re not worth it. Lovely looking game, but we’re not playing it again with just the two of us. Later that day, we also played a few games of Seaside. You can never go wrong with that; it’s the perfect example of a light camping game.

Back home, we grabbed another game we hadn’t played in two years: Clank! Neither of us was in an aggressive mood, so I think this was the first time we ended up delving in the deepest layers of the dungeon. We ended up with a really close score with only two points difference (140 and 142 points!), so that was a tense ending, trying to scrape all the points we could get on our way to the top.

This week, we’re not really sure what we’ll play. We’ll see! We have a board game night and a night planned with our storytelling games group, so that can end up interesting!