One of the coolest things about roleplaying games is creating a character, but it can also be tricky. It’s easier to pick a character that is close to your own personality but it might be more fun to pick something that’s more outside of your comfort level. In either case, if you’re not a talkative person and don’t feel comfortable being put in that position, I’d say you can always go with a barbarian! Be like Tom Hardy and just grunt a lot. 😉

Last week we’ve received a mystery package from Itten Games containing not one but FIVE games! We surely didn’t see that coming. They’re five games from the Fun Brick series and two of them are even designed by Reiner Knizia. The Fun Brick series are oddly shaped smaller boxes (long and rectangular like a…  small brick!) with short fun and silly games in them. So far we’ve played Viking See-Saw and Judge Domino. Viking See-Saw is just a hilarious balancing dexterity game in which the player who places all their goods on the ship first, is the winner. And Judge Domino is all about guessing if a chaotic row of domino stones will completely fall over or not. Playing it with just two, the latter would definitely work better with more players. We’re looking forward to trying out all of them. 😀

We also played our second team game of Undaunted and we’re liking it a lot! You can read about that on our Instagram account. And we played our first game of Village Rails! We thought that Village Green could be an intense little game, Village Green is no different! In the game, you’ll make seven routes and a good scoring route can make you thirty points while a terrible route could score you zero points. So having a couple of low-scoring routes on your tableau can really ruin your chances of winning. We think the game probably gets easier after playing it a few times. 🙂

This week will mostly be about rounding things up and making sure everything will be ready for SPIEL next week! We’re really looking forward to this year’s edition. We have a lot of fun meetings booked and look forward to meeting people again.

Oh, and in case you missed it, we published another comic for #SheGames last week and this week we’re having two extra comics lined up for you. One tomorrow and one on Thursday.

You don’t need big gestures or expensive gifts to show that you care! Sometimes taking the load of somebody can show that you care even more. In my case, that would be learning the rules of a game and explaining it to Heinze instead of the other way around. 😉

Last week we played a game of a soon-to-be-published game, but we can’t tell you about it yet, bummer! 😮 We can say that we really enjoyed our first play and are looking forward to playing it more soon and telling you about it.

We didn’t do a whole lot of gaming this week, we joined in a casual competition in our boulder gym and went to an art-tech festival Gogbot in our city. Yesterday, however, we actually played a mini tournament of the smaller Ticket to Ride editions with a friend of ours.

We started the afternoon with the three versions that we collectively owned, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and London. Seeing the three laying on the table… we all kinda felt it was a shame that we were only one short of the whole collection. So we made a deal and went to the store together to pick up TTR: New York and the player who won (scores of all games tallied up) would have to pay for it. Does that make sense? No, not really… :’)

The first two games, Amsterdam and London were in Heinze’s favor, Ruud and Rachel were left behind as he ended the game one or two turns earlier than expected (classic TTR 😅). After a break and walking to the store, Rachel came back hard and won San Francisco and New York. But not hard enough for the scores ended up being 136 points for Heinze, 134 (!!!) points for Rachel, and 100 points for Ruud.

It was cool playing all the different versions in a row, it did give us a clear view of the differences between them, with the most remarkable detail being that the newer the game… the more “trains” it has. So the little TTR games seem to be expanding?!

It’s our second week of Lion and Gazelle! You might have noticed we’re using a template inspired by Dinosaur comics, we really enjoyed making our two previously Dinosaur comics-inspired comics so we want to experiment a bit more with the format. Only two more Lion & Gazelle comics instead of our regular comics, although we might keep doing this as a separate thing if people enjoy it (let us know if you do!)

Because we’re busy doing quite a bit of home improvement, we haven’t played that many games, We did play our preproduction of Almost Innocent two more times and our initial impressions are very much holding up. We really like this co-op deduction game and we’re going to look into Hidden Leaders as apparently it’s set in the same universe which is always a fun idea. We also saw a lot of games we want to check out during the incredible amount of GenCon posts on social media, so it seems the “research all the new games” period before Spiel has started!

It’s August which makes it time for our annual Summer break/experiment. In the past we have done modern board games with boring Euro covers, we had some excellent guest comics and we had a poster project, which is almost ready to go on sale!

This year we thought it would be funny to reboot to oldest board game ‘comic’ as far as we know, the papyrus scroll with satirical vignettes found in Thebes showing, amongst other things, a lion and a gazelle playing Senet. It’s just a wonderful idea that people have been making funny pictures involving board games for thousands of years and that we are just continuing something that has been going on for so long. We originally learned of this image watching Quintin Smith’s talk on the history of board games which we can highly recommend.

That’s all for this week, we hope you enjoy our little experiment and we’ll see you next week for more Lion and Gazelle shenanigans!

Those three weeks are turning out to be an accurate assumption… Last week, we’ve started moving stuff, board games, and shelves around the house and it’s quite a puzzle that will take way more time than we had hoped! :’) But then again, it will be for the better and I can’t wait to be done with work so I can fully assist Heinze with painting the walls.

In August, we won’t be posting normal weekly comics, but we thought it was a wonderful moment to introduce a comic format we’ve been playing around with for over a year already. So we’ll continue posting a comic on Mondays, but it will be without our Semi Co-op characters – but it will still be about board games and it will be funny, no worries there. 😉

Talking about board games, we played some good ones last week! Heinze and I played three games of a brand new game Kites and we were a little shocked at how bad we were at it.  It’s a real-time co-op game with sand timers and you can read our first impression over here.

Now that we’ve finished The King’s Dilemma, we now have regular game nights with (up to) 7 people, so we’re exploring different kinds of games from everybody’s collections. First up was Escape from the Aliens from Outer Space and that was a blast! We remembered the game being fun, but we didn’t remember how easy and quick it is. Again, we’ve written a more detailed “report” on our Instagram if you’re curious! Next time, people voted for a chaotic 7 player game of Roborally, so that’s going to be interesting!

And yesterday, we played a four-player game of Root! Ahh, this game has so much charm! We played with the Scoundrel Vagabond, the Lizard Cult, the Underground Dutchy, and the Lord of the Hundreds. It was a fun combination of races and the new player that we introduced to the game, definitely wanted to play it again. And since we haven’t even played everything the latest expansion has to offer, we certainly wouldn’t mind playing it more often.

Today, we’re a week into the Kickstarter campaign for Board Game Day and it’s going so much better than we had hoped! Already more than 400 people backed our project! At 6 PM CEST today, Ambie and I will be present on Reddit for an AMA! If you have any questions for us, either about Board Game Day or something else, feel free to ask them there!

I’m super excited to announce that the project that I’ve been working on with Ambie Valdés (from Board Game Blitz) is now live on Kickstarter! It’s a rhyming children’s book about the fun of board gaming and it’s going to be a board book for the younger little ones! It’s been a lot of fun working on this with Ambie and I’m really happy that the Kickstarter is already going so well in the first few hours.

Click here to visit the Kickstarter page!

(Now I just have to let go and stop looking at the Kickstarter page…)

Sorry, not sorry, for this joke. We couldn’t resist turning it into a comic! :’D

So last week, the day came we knew that was coming… we finished The King’s Dilemma! We read that a lot of people didn’t like the ending of the game, but I guess we were not those people. That said, part of our group did not like the ending and felt it was out of place and a little convoluted. Despite not having played the game to “win” and mostly making choices from a roleplaying perspective, I surprisingly came in second place! It’s a good thing that there’s a Kickstarter for its successor on its way, The Queen’s Dilemma, because we’re definitely backing that! We’re going to have to seriously kick off the King’s Dilemma dynamic with this group since we started playing the game back in January 2020 (including a long Covid-break). We’ll mostly be with six players from now on, so if you have some excellent tips for games that play well with six – let us know in the comments!

Other games we played last week were Oltréé, Sagrada, Jenga, and P for Pizza! Still mostly lighter games but, hopefully, I’ll have the headspace for meatier games in a few weeks. And in other news… next week, Ambie Valdés will be launching a Kickstarter for her children’s book Board Game Day! and I’ve illustrated it! It’s such a lovely project and I can’t wait to share it with you all in a week! We’ve been working on this for almost a year and it’s exciting to see it becoming an actual book. 🙂

And if you’re interested in Semi Co-op art prints, it might be interesting to know that we send those to our patrons! If you become a $5 (or $10) patron before this Saturday, we’ll also send one (or two) art prints your way! You could also support our silly comic for just $1 a month and that grants you access to the Sketchie comics we publish on Patreon on the first Wednesday every month! If you become a patron now, that means there are 19 Patreon-exclusive comics waiting for you. 🙂

Culling games is hard… or is it? At first, we almost never culled a game but at one point we couldn’t store them anymore! While knowing you’ll probably never play a game again because of a lack of time or a preference for another game, we started to give away our games to friends and family. We never asked money for it and would just prefer that games found a new house where they would be played. Some games though, are for a very specific audience and giving them to a second-hand store, for example, wouldn’t reach the people who enjoy these games – so we do sometimes sell a game. Luckily, Heinze and I don’t often disagree on which games to cull. If games reach the “maybe?” pile, we often play the game another time before making a decision. And then there are also games that we know we’ll probably not play again (or maybe just once every five years…), but they have a sentimental value like Agricola! That game kinda was the beginning of our interest in modern board games, so I refuse to let it go…

Last week was my birthday,  I finished a bigger project and we were the Masters of Ceremonies of a wedding party of our friends (it even had a games corner!)! So it was a busy week. We only played a game of Roll for Galaxy and Heinze gifted me Radlands for my birthday! I’ve always thought the art of the game was amazing and now that I own the game, I can only say that I was right! I love the vibrant colors and character designs. Last night we also played the game and I’m happy to say that the game itself is also good. 😉 We’ve written our first impression and description of the game on Instagram if you’re interested: https://www.instagram.com/p/CfSCMW8LoUa/

Oh, and in case you missed it, we’ve published another comic in the #SheGames series commissioned by Board & Dice last week!

Ahh, tiebreakers! Even though we don’t need them that often, we’re always curious what the tiebreaker for a game is. Besides the strategic element (does it matter to have resources or coins left at the end e.g.) it’s also fun to see how many tiebreakers there are before you can declare that victory is shared. I don’t recall which game it is, but there is a game in which the rulebook says that if players are still tied after a set of tiebreakers, they should order some pizza and play the game again to determine the winner. Contrary to my cartoon alterego, I don’t mind too much if there is a shared victory.

Last week we’ve played an always fun game of It’s a Wonderful World and that same night we played the most surprising game of the week: Sneaky Bastard. We’ve had this little card game at home for a while but never got around to playing it these past months. It’s an auction/bidding game about real estate with a fun twist. Every player has two Sneaky Bastard cards they can use and when they do… a second auction starts on the bids on the real estate bidding. Creating an auction-within-an-auction situation. This leaves players with the dilemma that if they offer a lot of money for a house, they know that one of the players bidding in this second auction, will gain all the money of the winning bid in the house auction. The only cards that are worth “points” at the end of the game are actual house cards, so they’re a really cool balance going on in the game. Absolutely a game you might want to check out if you’re into auction games.

In the vintage category, we played Tell Me: The Grand Quiz Game, or as it’s called in Dutch: Super Pim Pam Pet which clearly is the superior name. 😉 It’s not a creative game, but fun enough to have a good time with friends. During a picnic on Saturday, we played two games of Ticket to Ride: London and Sunday we played some KLASK and Kombo Klash! – clearly it was a day for games with a letter K!

Oh and in case you missed it, we’ve published a fun commissioned comic about Sniper Elite last Thursday!