There’s been an increase in so-called cozy games, but I feel that it’s gotten a boost lately. Maybe it’s the increasingly harsh reality of the world or a change in the target audience, where theme and art have become more important? I don’t know, but since I’m a sucker for pretty pictures, I can totally live with that. 😉 There are the good and the bad in the genre, but that’s all okay—nowadays there are enough games on the market, so there’s definitely something out there for everyone.
I just called cozy games a ‘genre’, which of course isn’t really a thing, since cozy is a subjective term—people find different things cozy. For me, a cozy game is one with a softer theme (nature/fantasy/life), that’s gentle on the eyes, and doesn’t require you to burn your brain. Examples? Forest Shuffle but I’d almost call Distilled a cozy game too, although it might be a tad long.

Speaking of shorter games… we played loads of them last week! It was the week of small games, somehow.

We started with an all-time favorite: Kombo Klash! We’ve only ever played it with just two players and still need to try it with three or four. If you don’t know this game and you like a light, quick, and fun strategic game on a grid with loads of combo options, this is one to check out. Alas, the game is out of print, so you might want to grab a copy if you ever come across it.

Heinze played a game of Air, Land, and Sea: Critters at War and it’s still a perfectly good lane battler. I’m still surprised that this reskin version exists, although I can see how the original might be ignored by a lot of potential players just because of its straightforward art. This one just looks way more interesting and has humor, with amazing art by Derek Laufman.

We had some time to kill after a little walk in the evening and grabbed the game Dirt and Glory. It’s a Blackjack-inspired card game we got at Spiel last year, and it’s a simple but fun push-your-luck game. It has a fun element where each player has “reserved cards” besides their draw deck. At the start of every round, you draw two cards, play one, and the other goes to your reserved pile. These cards can be accessed through some card abilities or by spending fuel tokens. It gives this highly luck-based game a little strategic bite.

On Friday, we had friends over and quickly assessed that everybody had had a long week—we weren’t going to play a longer game that night. Smaller games it was! One friend brought an extremely silly game he bought at a flea market: Kneedfeest (“kneading party”). What can I say… it was Pictionary with funny-smelling clay. One member of both teams got the same word they had to “visualize,” and the team that guessed it correctly first got to take a piece of clay away from the other team. The team that runs out of clay first loses the game.

After that, we played Moving Wild with six players. That was a completely different experience from playing it with just the two of us. Because you get to draft way less cards, the game is a lot harder! Still a lovely drafting game for such a tiny box. From one Oink game, to another and we played A Fake Artist Goes to New York and we realized that we’ve been playing it wrong all this time. We’ve never announced a ‘theme’ before handing out the assignments, meaning it’s been incredibly hard for the fake artist all this time. The night continued and since the mood status was “LOL” we continued that by playing a game of Ransom Notes, a silly party game with word magnets.

This weekend, Heinze and I felt like playing at least one bigger game, and we decided on a game of Root! Root isn’t at its best with two players, but we wanted to try and see if adding the Hirelings and the Landmarks to the game might change that. The Landmarks were a fun twist, and the Hirelings made things quite interesting—their benefits for the player who controls them are not to be underestimated. Heinze played The Hundreds, but we both concluded that that faction is probably more fun to play when there are more than two players. In the end, scoring was very close! I was only one point short of victory with The Dutchy, despite being almost completely wiped off the map by Heinze’s annoying Commander.

Actually, I’m not that bad at taking turns and have gotten much better at the analysis paralysis thing, but we thought it would make for a funny and topical joke. 😉

So we played very few games the previous week and we made up for that a little bit this week! We kicked off with a game of Agricola. Since our friend has now completed his collection, we’re trying out all the weird decks and extra stuff. We played with the E-deck this time and that was interesting. There are a lot of “could-be-very-powerful” cards in there, but they did feel very circumstantial and hard to actually use them right. I did have a weird game in which I kept my farm tiny (just two rooms) and although I only had two actions for most of the game, I didn’t even score last. So something went right! But… we also played with the Legen*dairy Forest-Deck and our friend just kept getting very powerful cards from there, while the other players got quite some bad stuff. It threw the balance off quite a lot, but it’s funny to spice things up once in a while. Next time, we’ll have to try the X-deck, which adds weird alien encounters whenever you visit the stone quarry.

On Friday, we had a fun game night! Originally, we were going to be with seven players, but two called in sick, which changed the range of games we could play. After dinner, we started off with the fun little dice chucker Sausage Sizzle! It’s silly, it’s cute and always handy to have since you could probably play it with anybody. After that, Paperback got the most votes!

Somehow, the game took longer than it should. The market was almost fully sold out (except the Tier 3 cards) before people started scoring enough money on the words to buy the higher-score cards. We’re not sure what happened there, but next time we’ll either add the typo cards or reduce the number of score cards to shorten the game a little (the game ends when two stacks of the score cards are emptied). However, we did have a good time and everybody wants to play it again some other time. 🙂

We ended the night with a game of Illimat. We wanted to introduce it to a friend because we thought he would appreciate the concept and aesthetic. He did! And he also won and that’s impressive for playing it for the first time.

This weekend, we finally had part two of our Magic: Lord of the Rings draft event we had last year. The stars and schedules weren’t aligned so it took a while before we could make this happen. A friend managed to buy a few more draft boosters, so we could slightly adjust our decks and we played a few games and had a nice dinner together. Good times!

Right now, the situation looks rather grim for the board game industry, and weekly we hear about companies that have either shut down or had to let go of staff. It’s hard to see that this industry is being hit so hard by the actions and opinions of politicians while they are just trying to run a business as best they can. Frank West has written some interesting blog posts about the tariffs and the consequences. We have no control over what’s going on in the USA, so the only thing we can do is wish everybody impacted by this the best of luck, and we really do hope that this impulsive and shortsighted policy will be reversed asap…

Let’s take a look at what we’ve been up to last week. We played our very first game on Thursday at a friend’s birthday party. A good time, cake, combined with a game of Head Hackers! We hadn’t played it in over five years, but he kept mentioning the game multiple times over the past years, so we decided to bring it with us as a surprise. It was just as silly as we could remember but a fine game to play at a chill party.

The following night, we had ‘story game night’! The last time, we started playing “I’m sorry, did you say Street Magic?” but we didn’t reach a conclusion we were satisfied with that night, so we continued expanding our world and its story. After a quick recap, we were right back into our world with weird characters with weird accents and we managed to bring the session to a great end! Puzzle pieces clicked and everybody was satisfied with how we rounded things up.

During the weekend, we spent one day hiking in the beautiful Tecklenburger Land region in Germany. Since we have a car now, these places are way more accessible to us, and it’s the only place “nearby” where you can practice hiking with some height differences. Not compatible with hiking in the mountains, but at least it’s better than what the Netherlands has to offer in that aspect.

On Sunday, we played our very first Vital Lacerda game! Our friend Jeroen invited us to play Escape Plan, and yes, please! We really enjoyed our first play, it was exciting and not that complex. Everything in the game oozes with the theme and because of that, actions feel logical and that takes away part of the complexity. That being said, the game has a complexity score of 3,6 on BGG, so it definitely is a light Lacerda game. It was fun, we all managed to escape and we finished way quicker than we thought, so we could play more games!

First, we almost randomly picked Neoville from the shelves because nobody had heard of this Phil Walker-Harding game (and the playing time of 45 minutes was inviting). In Neoville, you’re building your dream eco-city by placing terrain tiles and carefully adding skyscrapers and biostructures. It’s all about matching the right conditions while building your city – and avoiding penalties for poor planning. It’s a light game with a strategic aspect, I’d say it’s perfect for families. We ended the afternoon with two team games of Crokinole and we understand why people can get hyped for this game, it’s just an excellent dexterity game.

We all have our own ways of dealing with stress, and while I like getting my hands dirty and doing some gardening, painting miniatures really works for Heinze. As you can probably understand, six armies in two weeks is an exaggeration, but he did manage to paint a very cool Kill team army in some free time after work (you can see it at the end of the weekly recap video) in two weeks.

We’ll leave the therapeutic and stressful things aside for now. Last week had a great start! A package containing some Agricola expansions we had ordered for our friend seemed to have gotten lost in the mail, but it turned up and was delivered to our house! With that, how now owns all the expansions for the game and we’re kinda scared of our next game of Agricola, for it might turn into a very complex one with all these new additional things. But we’re also kind of excited to see how different the game will be. We’ll experience it later this week and will let you know next week!

On Thursday, we played a relaxing game of Let’s Go! To Japan with the two of us (never played it with more players actually…) and on Friday, we had a special game night planned. It was Semi Co-op’s anniversary and we invited friends over for apple pie and a game of Joyride. Joyride only goes to four players and we were with six so we thought… why not play two games next to each other? We have enough maps and cars for that many players so we printed some extra checkpoint markers and we gave it a go. Everybody had a great time and we were all very surprised that both games ended at exactly the same moment! The timing was almost unbelievable.

On Sunday, Heinze played The Defence of Procyon III, and since I didn’t want to give you my second-hand insights… he wrote a little about it for this week’s blog post:
Defence of Procyon 3 is one of those games that I wanted to play even before its Kickstarter started. I did play a few turns of it on Tabletop Simulator, but last year, a friend gave me a copy of the game, because he knew I wanted to play IRL for years. The story of the game is that a human science expedition gets attacked by an alien fleet that wants an artifact back. Meanwhile, a human space fleet is approaching the planet to extract the scientists from the surface, and the four players play out the space and ground battle between both parties.

It’s very asymmetrical with every player getting their own rulebook, and it helps if you know a little bit about how your ally and your direct opponent work. I played the human ground force, which is all about powerful hero abilities on the board, while my alien opponent had less direct control of his forces, being only allowed to control units in areas that were shown on the cards he drew.

While it was a learning game, we had loads of fun, and we all felt that the other player was way stronger. The asymmetric part of the game really helps to sell how alien your opponent is, which is a very cool feeling. In the end, the humans won, and we already planned a new game! I think the Aliens now have a much better understanding of how to win, so I suspect the next game is going to be even more tense.

This week, we’ll be playing games of a little less epic proportions, but I still expect we’ll have a good time. 😉

It’s a recurring problem with us: just a few days in advance, we realize that it’s Semi Co-op’s anniversary and it happened again this year. And that while this coming Friday marks our tenth anniversary! A crazy milestone! And we forgot about it – but in our defense, we have both been very busy the past two months with work and other things I won’t get into, so we didn’t have time or the headspace to plan some great epic event to celebrate. I’ve accepted that that is how life works sometimes, and I’m at peace with that. Quite honestly, I’m surprised Semi Co-op is still around, and that in itself is a victory – plus I’ve definitely accomplished my original target of getting better at drawing (cartoon) characters, huzzah! 😉

So let’s take a look at what we did last week. First, it was time to continue our Middara campaign and we’ve now completed chapter one! We enjoy that it’s a bit heavier on the story side than Gloomhaven was but sometimes that does mean that you have to read out four pages of text. And yes, we are aware that there is an app with a voice-over but we’re the group that enjoys reading the story out loud and we even voice-act all the characters. It makes it way more fun and interesting than letting one person read the whole story out loud or listen to it through a speaker.

Since we didn’t feel like reading another three pages of text that same night, we decided to play some short games and we ended up introducing our friend to Trio and one of our favorite weird games Rollecate. Rollecate remains such a weird concept to explain to people, and it’s hard to play right! That being said, I believe I might have mastered it since I’ve scored very few negative points this time, hah! Or it might have been luck, hush.

Another small game we played was Confusing Lands, which we bought as a print-and-play to bring with us on our hiking vacation two years ago. In the meantime, the game has actually gotten a physical release, and we think it’s a really fun microgame for two players. Every game, there’s a shared scoring objective, and during the game, you can add more personal scoring objectives to your world but each one costs you ten points; so you have to make sure to make it count. That, combined with that you’ll only play eight cards during the entire game, makes for a fun and short puzzle!

The “big” gaming day of last week was our six-player team game of Dune: Imperium Uprising. Everybody was a bit sceptical about the downtime with that many players but the interaction between team members and players prevented that from happening. We all agreed it actually worked really well and that it was fun! We were both Muad’Dib and although we did quite well at the start of the game, we got wiped in the end phase. Our worms didn’t bring enough power to the battlefield and, sometimes, that was a little frustrating. Even when we had a battle with FIVE worms, we didn’t win. Ouch. For next time, we might have to look up some strategy guides and see what works best for the sand people. 🙂

We have little planned this week, except for Heinze who has a game of The Defence of Procyon III planned this weekend. I’m reaaaally curious what he’ll think of that one!

… April Fool’s!
To be honest, due to deadlines, I wasn’t able to make and upload a comic yesterday. Then, we realized that today is April 1st, and it felt silly to ignore that detail! This comic also made me look up how many comics there are in our archives, and there are 683 of them, oh my!

Let’s look back at last week and what we played. The first game we played was Flatiron! When you play it, you can just feel that this two-player game is made by the same designers as White Castle, but I can’t really explain why. Also, that’s not a bad thing! Flatiron is a clever worker placement game in which players are both adding pillars and floors to the Flatiron building. We’ve played it four times now, and I really like it! It’s a better choice than White Castle if you’re playing with two, since White Castle is at its best with three or more players.

Heinze played another game of Kill Team with a friend, and he was mostly frustrated with the rules of the game that were holding him back and made it impossible for him to advance with his Orks without being slaughtered by the boosted Death Korps of Krieg units. Poor Heinze… His Ork army is starting to look really cool, though!

On Friday night, we played the DM-less RPG “i’m sorry did you say street magic“. It feels a lot like the roleplaying game Microscope, with the difference being that you’re creating a city together instead of an entire world. Funnily enough, we got strayed on details way quicker this time than we did when we created an entire world in Microscope. We ended up with a very cool city that exists out of spaceships combined together, forming some kind of moon with an intricate way of traveling. But our ideas were way too many to cover in one night, so we planned another night to give it our weird creation some kind of ending. 🙂 We ended the night with another game of Can’t Stop as a ‘pallet-cleanser”.

During the weekend, we returned once again to the classic beloved and hated Agricola. Since we’re playing it quite regularly now, we’re slowly starting to explore all the different things that come with the 15th anniversary box and some of the extra decks he owns. We added an extra action field and the Season board. The Season board is quite interesting, but can also be very frustrating since it limits some resources during certain seasons. In another season, that said resource will produce one more, so they made sure it balances out, but the timing can either work in your favor… or not. Next time, we might add the X deck, which adds really weird stuff to the game. Aliens… in Agricola? It’s almost like adding zombies to it (let’s be honest, that felt like an April Fool’s joke!).

On Sunday, I (finally) spent the entire day in the garden since that really needed some love and attention… so alas, different priorities! This week, we’ve got little planned except for Middara and a team game of Dune: Imperium Uprising, so we’ll see if we pick some games with just the two of us.

Usually, we try to stay away from the dark and gloom of the real world in this comic, but sometimes it just works its way into a comic, sorry! Heinze was still looking for a punchline for this comic and, like in the comic, I couldn’t help but blurt out “real life” and that was not the direction he originally had in mind –  so it’s my bad folks. :’)

Back to the subject of board games, because they are a perfect distraction from the things that are happening in the world right now! We had three game nights with friends last week and we played very different games so it’s been a nice mixture of games.

On Monday night, we didn’t want to watch television but we were a little too tired for anything complicated so we played a few games of Star Realms: Colony Wars. I was once more reminded of how powerful the combination of Blob and Star Empire cards is! Both of us were victorious with that combination of factions. I still try to win with a greater focus on deck management with the Machine Cult, but it hasn’t worked out yet – any tips?

On Thursday, we had some nice contrasting games. We started the night with a game of Décorum – a co-op deduction game in which you’re trying to decorate a house in a way that (literary) checks every player’s boxes. All players have multiple hidden personal goals, like Player 1 doesn’t want anything yellow on the ground floor, Player 2 wants a different color on the wall in every room, etc etc. Quite early in the game, we thought we were so close and that the first scenario was way too easy and that’s the moment things started to go wrong. It took us another 15 rounds to figure out the right configuration, whoops! But we did manage to get there in the end.

After that, we played Innovation for the first time. It’s one of our friend’s favorite games and he had just received the Ultimate edition a few days before so it was a perfect moment to introduce us to the game! Despite Innovation being quite a mechanical game with a little “dry” theme, we both enjoyed the game! There is a lot of room for strategy and it’s a game you can get really good at and I think you can make some really sick combos once you know what you’re doing!

The following day, we played a game we hadn’t played for NINE years: Chinatown! It took me one or two rounds to get back into that “aggressive” negotiation mode with fellow players but after that, it was great fun! Strategically,  I’m not particularly good at the game but I did end up with a completed restaurant, a tropical fish shop, and a laundry place… so I was pleased! But in retrospect, I’ve spent way too much money getting stuff from my fellow players so I came in third, haha. I’ll keep that in mind for next time (which I’ll forget again if it takes another nine years). We ended the night with a light game of Quibbles!

The day after that, we went to friends and even though we hadn’t labeled the night as game night, we did end up playing two games. They have a very impressive collection of Love Letter games and one of those is the Star Wars edition. So far, we’ve only played the original game and the Marvel edition so it’s fun to see how this edition works with two factions and plays around with that element! After that we played another game we had never played before: Gingerbread House. It’s a cute and laid-back family game with a fun combination of scoring methods. Nothing too challenging but just fun to play!

This week, we’ve got “only” two game nights planned, one with Joyride and the other one… we’ll see when we’re there!

In the end, it all comes down to one question— is a game’s box just a container, or is it something more? If it’s not used during gameplay, does it really add value to the experience? For many people, it absolutely does! This might be the key difference between a collector and someone who takes a more practical approach. Of course, storage space plays a big role too. I’ve even seen people store board games in ziplock bags—usually kids’ games—but it’s always fascinating to see how different people organize their collections.

Speaking of BIG BOXES, it was time for more Middara! We’re just very slowly working our way through the campaign for as long as we think it’s fun, and so far, that’s the case! We enjoy the strategic choices but we are slowly seeing a repetitive pattern in the scenarios – but we’re also on the brink of a bigger story plot thing, so the game might introduce new things to spice things up soon.

We don’t often go to things like concerts, musicals, and theater shows, but by chance, it happened that we were invited by friends to go to the Moulin Rouge musical this week, while we already went to another theater show last week. It was a really impressive show and knowing the movie really well, it was nice to see the differences. I don’t think I’ve heard that many different songs in one show – that must have been a nightmare for the legal team, haha. Since we went with friends who also enjoy board games, they brought Kluster and we brought Love Letter as a fun activity while we had to wait for our food at the restaurant.

This weekend, we had an Agricola game night! Our friend has the 15th Anniversary edition, and it’s a game we keep coming back to from time to time. We have a special relationship with the game since it was our first serious hobby game that we bought after our apartment on the ground floor got flooded fourteen years ago (but that’s another story). That was in a time when we mostly played games like Munchkin, so it was quite a step up! There is still so much in this game we haven’t played yet and expansions we’d like to try (if we can ever find them) – so we’ll keep playing it! 😉

On Sunday, it felt like an early Spring day and the weather was just lovely. We decided to take a walk and bring Seaside with us to play outside. Seaside is a fun and quick push-your-luck game with lovely wooden tokens! The game area is divided into the sea (a shared central area) and each player’s Seaside. On their turn, a player draws a token from a bag, secretly chooses which side to use, and applies its effect. Blue tokens interact with the sea and can trigger extra turns, while white tokens are placed on a player’s Seaside to help build their stack. Different tokens interact in unique ways—waves flip beaches, sandpipers collect isopods, and rocks attract crabs. When the bag is empty, players stack up their collected tokens, and the tallest stack wins.

This week, we’ve got multiple game nights planned, and we’re looking forward to them. 🙂