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Posts authored by Rachel
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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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Disclaimer: A huge thank you to all the publishers for giving us a copy of the games mentioned below.
So our great exploration of all the new games has begun! We’re quite intimidated with all the new games in our house (and the ones our friends bought we’d like to play as well), but we ended up playing quite a few, last week! We’re not reviewers, so I’m just going to write down our first impressions here.
We, of course, played a game of Cartographers and that was fun! Although by sheer coincidence, almost all of the monster cards showed up in the last ten cards of the game, making it quite a “normal” roll & write game without the “take-that!” player interaction we were hoping for… until the very end when it didn’t have as much impact anymore. We’ll play it again soon and see how it goes then!
We also played a game of Miyabi, which is an interesting combination of Azul and Number 9 – although it leans more towards Number 9 than Azul. We think this would be great for families – it might be a little too light to our taste, but we still want to play the game with more than two players and see how it goes with a higher player count.
Next up was Wayfinders and that game showed us the potential the game has! We really like the game mechanics, but with just two players, it’s very easy to not to cross each other. We’re really looking forward to trying this game with four players, it kind of lacks player interaction on the map with just two explorers and we think it will really shine if there’s more going on on the table.
On The Underground was a surprise for us, a lot of people say it’s like Ticket to Ride, and yes, you’re laying down rail tracks, but that’s about all the similarity there is between the two. We really liked our first play and it’s fun anticipating which tracks the passenger will use to get to their destination each turn and we can’t wait to play the Berlin side of the board.
The biggest surprise for us was our four-player game of It’s A Wonderful World. This card drafting engine builder immediately clicked with our group and we immediately played it again after our first game. If time had allowed it, we would probably have played a third time that night. Also, we really enjoyed the card art and often just paused to admire that.
And last night we played our very first game of Everdell, friends of ours had bought a lovely collector’s edition at Spiel and oh my, the game looks gorgeous. In itself, the game mechanics are nothing new, but it’s just really nicely executed, making it a joy to play. And it was fun that, although our friends had been playing this multiple times this week, there was just a four-point difference between the winner and the last player – it was so close!
Hopefully, we’ll also manage to play some new titles, probably not as many as last week, but we’ll give it a try!
What are your thoughts on roll-and-write games with a little “take that!” element in it?
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Halloween! It’s a great time to get out your favorite “scary” games like Betrayal, Ghostel, Eldritch Horror or even Dead of Winter. Even though we would really like to play these games right now, we can’t because…
While writing this, we’re still in Essen! SPIEL is over and it was amazing and we’re completely exhausted and are now chilling with Efka and Elaine from NoPunIncluded in our hotel waiting for our train back home.
The fair was mostly a social thing for us so in the coming weeks, we’ll finally get to try out games our friends and us acquired. We’ve got some really good and interesting ones and it’s going to be a lot of fun to find some new favorites.
Speaking of favorites, one of our favorite moments was getting to make a game with Gil Hova on the Asmodee Live Stream in 30 minutes! We had no idea what to expect but thanks to Mathilde, Chris and Gil we had loads of laughs and it was over before we knew it. If looking at us goofing off with toy dinosaurs, rubber ducks and paper plates sound like your kinda thing you can see it all here.
We just want to thank everybody that made Spiel such an amazing experience this year. From people in the halls telling us they like what we’re doing, publishers taking to time to talk to us, all the volunteers that demoed us games and old friends that we only get to see once or twice a year. It has been an immensely rewarding couple of days and we hope everybody is looking back with as many amazing memories as we are.
What was your Spiel highlight, either online or from the halls?
The extra Semi Co-op comics are made possible by CoolStuffInc.com! Be the first to read our latest comics by subscribing to their newsletter.
The extra Semi Co-op comics are made possible by CoolStuffInc.com! Be the first to read our latest comics by subscribing to their newsletter.
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It’s sometimes very easy to get a rule slightly wrong and that can affect the fun of a game immensely, without knowing that you might just have played it incorrectly. This mistake in Pandemic is quite an often made error made by people, I believe we did this once as well in the first time. On the top of my head, I can’t really name any structural mistakes we’ve made in games, but maybe you have a juicy one to share in the comments. 😉
A game in which we did get the rules right, is The Networks, which we played that last week with five players! It’s still such a great and funny game and is very unlikely to ever leave our game collection. In The Networks, players each run their own TV station and have to buy shows, ads and TV stars for their programming. All the shows in there are either completely random, like “Unlocking your cat’s psychic potential” or are a parody on existing shows. Every time we’ve played it so far, everybody at the table is just having a lot of fun even though it’s quite an economical game and that might not be everyone’s idea of fun.
And this weekend it was (finally) time again for our D&D session! Our party is currently in an ancient Dwarven city that doesn’t want to be in contact with the rest of the world and we ended up clearing some mine shafts of stone golems to gain some trust there. Now, we all thought we were doomed when it turned out the stone golems dealt around 22 damage with each hit, with us being level 3 characters… (eek!) But we somehow did manage to beat them and survive. Hurray!
This coming week is going to be hard work to finish everything that needs to be done for Spiel next week! We already made some fun appointments with publishers which we are looking forward to and our schedules are a good combination of free time and meetings. We’re so looking forward to it this year!
Have you ever disliked a game only to figure out you’ve been playing it wrong?
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