It’s time for us to present you the silliest and maybe most random awards in the board gaming industry… The Golden Standees! This year, we’ve given the award itself a retouch and we couldn’t resist adding the shape of a D20 in there because of, well, 2020!

This year’s winners are Cubitos by Alderac Entertainment Group, Quirky Circuits by Plaid Hat Games, Village Green by Osprey Games, and we wanted to also give an award to Board Game Arena, Tabletopia, and Tabletop Simulator for making gaming with others remotely possible during this pandemic! Congratulations to all! We hope you’ll enjoy this award!

We’re off outside to enjoy the snow since we almost never have that anymore and the world looks very cool right now. 😉

We’re super enthusiastic about the rulebook of Lost Ruins of Arnak, we enjoy it so much, that we agreed it deserved its own comic! After we’ve read it the first time, we just knew how to play the game and we didn’t need to check the rulebook at all during the game. We only check the backside of the rulebook during setup to see what the starting tokens are for the players. Compliments to Czech Games Edition for this rulebook! It looks good, it’s logically structured, and has the right amount of text and visual examples to make the rules easy to absorb.

Last week was a little bit weird. There are some things playing in our personal lives and I felt kinda drained. Nonetheless, we still played a game almost every night and that honestly surprised me! We kicked off the week by playing High Rise. We hadn’t played it in quite a while and we really enjoy this economic game by Gil Hova, plus it plays quite quickly (about two hours) with just two players.

On Tuesday we played some relaxing Dragon Castle! It’s funny that this was the first time we’ve added one of the extra modules (spirit cards in our case) to spice up the game a little. So far, we just didn’t think the game needed it to be fun, to be honest. The next day, we continued our Imperial Assault campaign that we started the week before and once again we were reminded: sometimes it’s way better to make a run for it than to defeat all the enemies on the board!

On Thursday something exciting was delivered! Our new table! Our old table was quite narrow, which often was a hassle with games with a bigger centerboard and player boards. We now have a table that’s 180 x 100cm and that feels like a perfect size. I’m sure it’s still not big enough for some games, but we just don’t have the room for a bigger one or one of those fancy game tables. The first game we played on the table was Hive, still one of my favorite smaller games.

We also played Lost Ruins of Arnak and we’re still amazed by the game after playing it for the fifth time. It somehow just clicks with us. I did lose the first four games, but this time, I finally won my first game! Hah – may this be a turning point for future games! On Saturday morning, we played a game of Chai, with a nice cup of tea, of course.

Now for this coming week, there will be a brand new Sketchie comic available on our Patreon on Wednesday. If you’re not a patron and reading this, for just $1 a month you’ll get access to the new Sketchies and you get to support our comic for which we would be very grateful. 🙂

Next week, we’re finally going to present our Golden Standees of 2020! We’re about a month later than usual, but then again, these are weird times and we’d still like to give away our silly awards to people/games/things in the board gaming industry. Better late than never!

Last week we’ve updated our Patreon page. We’ve changed some of the rewards and we’ll start making our Sketchie comics again for our patrons! For only $1 a month, you get access to brand new extra comics and you get to support our work so we can keep making comics every week! We would really appreciate it if you’d consider becoming a patron, thanks! <3

I mean, cats… Especially Starbuck in our case has the tendency to want to be the center of attention and she often finds it hard to share the attention with a board game. But how can you say no to that face? 😉

Last week flew by, honestly, I can hardly remember what we’ve played. Luckily, we’ve got an app for that! We played a scenario of Gloomhaven, making it our 41st play…! Honestly, does anybody know somebody who actually finished the game? We’re determined to finish it, but we’re also wondering how many years it will take us. I think there will even be a successor to Frosthaven by the time we finish Gloomhaven. But, we’re still having fun with it and that’s impressive.

We also played a relaxing two-player game of PARKS. Ever since we’ve played it with four players, we now realize how non-aggressive the game is with just two players. I still can’t believe how amazingly pretty everything in the game is.
Our adventure in the stone age also continued and we finally beat the fourth scenario (it took us four tries in total)! The day after we played the fifth scenario, which turned out to be suspiciously easy after the previous one. We really enjoy Paleo and frankly think it’s one of the better co-op games out there and we can’t wait to introduce it to other people once we get to organize game nights again. We play the game with just two players, which we think works fine, but everybody is stoked about playing it with 3-4 players.

What else did we play…? Oh yes! The King is Dead. We had played this with three players and really loved the experience. This weekend, we wanted to give it a try with just two players. The game doesn’t disappoint, but in our two games, the tie-breaker decided both times who won. The last player seemed to have an advantage in setting the final board state, so we focused too much on passing, just to be the last in the game. We’ll give it a try with the advanced card deck and see how that works for us. Otherwise, we’ll just save it for when we can play it with three or four players!

We ended the weekend with Onitama, which is one of those almost iconic games that definitely replace chess for us. It’s quick, it’s different every time and it looks impressive.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! With our country still being in lockdown, it was just us and the cats on New Year’s Eve. Normally we’re not really party people on the last day of the year, but this year, we saw no other people and we just stayed inside and played some games and watched some TV. Fireworks were prohibited this year, but people clearly ignored that and there were about as many fireworks as every year.

So we ended 2020 with having played 343 games in total, that’s ten more than our previous record! Our top We show some of our stats and our top 10 most-played games were:

1. Tiny Towns
2. The Crew
3. Gloomhaven
4. Mansions of Madness
5. Mental Blocks
6. Quirky Circuits
7. Abandon All Artichokes
8. Ghost Adventure
9. Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam
10. Coup

You can see more detailed stats and our highlights of the year on our Twitter account if you’re interested!

Last week has been nice and relaxing and we enjoyed a full week without any work at all! We’ve played… Gods Love Dinosaurs, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, Abandon All Artichokes, Tiny Towns, Lego Creationary, Mansions of Madness and Cubitos. We’re giving away Lego Creationary to friends and wanted to play it one last time and we’re not sorry it’s going to go. We think it might be really good with children, but it didn’t work for us. 🙂

We played two scenarios of Mansions of Madness and those were a lot of fun. We really enjoy the creativity of the different scenarios and we always just have a good time playing this almost RPG-like experience.

For now, it’s back to work and we’re looking forward to the new year, we have awesome plans for Semi Co-op and there are so many awesome games to play. We wish you all the best for 2021! 🙂

What do you look for in a table? We don’t have a separate game room, so we play all of our board games on our kitchen table and it’s a delicate balance between what you’d like and what’s practical. 😉 One of those fancy big board gaming tables, for example, ain’t gonna fit and are way too bulky for our kitchen – but you do need some space for bigger board games… choices!

Our current table is beginning to show a lot of wear and tear after almost a decade of service and we’ve ordered a new one! It’s a little broader than the one we have now so we hope that will make things fit easier when games already take up quite some space and have separate player boards like Root for example.

Earlier today we got the news that The Netherlands will be going in lockdown for more than a month, so we wish everybody the best during these hard times – keep calm and stay safe! For us, that means no more bouldering, which we normally do twice a week. I guess that leaves more time for playing board games and luckily there are quite some board games that can be played remotely and our favorite one so far is Tiny Towns. It just makes for a relaxing puzzle to solve while you can chat with people. And this lockdown combined with canceled Christmas parties will be the perfect moment to play some scenarios of Mansions of Madness. 😀

Writing a good rulebook is incredibly hard to do and I don’t envy the people who are tasked with doing it. Please note that I’m not trying to criticize the people who write them. But sometimes, by just reading a rulebook some games seem too hard to get a grasp of but once you play the game it turns out it wasn’t as complex as it seems. A great example of a rulebook that we really appreciate, is The Lost Ruins of Arnak. The game seems kinda daunting at the start but the rulebook really explained the flow of the game well and clear. 🙂

We’ve been busy playing all the new games that have arrived at our house lately and we’re really pleased that we’ve got only two more to go! Samoa and the second case of Pocket Detective. Every year after Spiel we set ourselves a challenge and that is to play all the new games before the start of the new year and this year we did really well if I might say so. I’m glad we now get to explore a lot of these new titles a little further and play them more often because there are a lot of great games!

A new game we’ve played six times now is Paleo! We’ve played it again this weekend and it was rather brutal for our human tribes. We lost the scenario we’ve played twice and we’re curious what we should do to win it, except for a little more luck with drawing cards and rolling the dice with some enemies. The game is fun enough (and plays quick enough) that we certainly going to try again, so we’ll beat it. 🙂

We’re also looking forward to playing Gods Love Dinosaurs again, our first play went well, but I feel that our second play will be quite different now we have “some experience” and know what to look out for.