Whenever a new game was delivered to our doorstep we could be sure of one thing: at least one of our cats would jump into the empty box. In the last couple of years, Apollo would also claim that box as his sleeping spot for a couple of weeks (until a better box arrived). It gave shipping boxes an extra function instead of them going straight to the trash (or being re-used to sell games). It’s been weirdly quiet around the house without the cats so it’s great to draw them from time to time. 🙂

There’s no weekly recap video this week because I’ve been ill! Combining that with multiple deadlines hasn’t been great but I’m starting to feel better again. It did mean that we didn’t play any games all week. Except for last night. Our mini-painting night got canceled due to friends also being ill (I guess it’s going around…), so Heinze and I had the night to ourselves.

It was time to dive back into Joyride. There was a little controversy about the game last week so we felt it was a great moment to play it more! The first two games we played earlier lacked the chaos I was expecting and it felt more like a tactical racing game. I assume this will be totally different when playing it with three or four players but we haven’t gotten that chance yet. So last night, we picked out the more chaotic maps (like the volcano) and even added the monsters. This made things more interesting in my opinion although the chaos hit Heinze way harder than myself. Due to some very lucky dice rolls, I currently have a 100% win rate in Joyride but… I’m afraid that won’t last forever. 😉

It was the start of December and that means two things! First: It’s Heinze’s birthday tomorrow, hurray! Second, it means that we’ve been logging our board game plays for ten years now! You can see our top 50 most-played games right here. We haven’t logged details like the winner from the start, so we cannot give you any stats on who has won the most games alas. 😉 There were quite a few surprises in the list, even for us. We owned fewer games back then so it makes sense that we played a lot of them more often. We almost feel like pushing the pause button for a year and just starting playing the games we own right now.

Our Middara night has been replaced with our rescheduled mini-painting night so we’ll see how many games we can get to the table this week! But one thing is sure, it will probably be more than last week.

In case you missed it, we published an extra comic last week about Rebel Princess! Oh, and since this comic is about boxes…

(this comic was based on/inspired by this Twitter topic!)
Culling board games… a sometimes necessary thing that needs to be done. It hurts the inner-collecter and emotional side of me but it also needs to happen to make some mental and actual space to enjoy board games again. Each year after SPIEL, we have to take a critical look at our collection and have to let go of some games. Sometimes you have to admit that certain might not be played anymore or that there’s another game in the same genre that we like better now.

This week was busy busy busy! It’s clear that, work-wise, there’s a ‘last weeks of the year’-sprint going on right now.  Luckily, despite our being really stressed at work, we managed to have some time for games and to see friends.

On Thursday we had ‘Dexterity Donderdag’ which translates to Dexterity Thursday. Normally we would have played another game of Arcs but one of our group had to call it a night a little earlier and they had never played a dexterity game before so we saw a chance to introduce them to some! We started off with Tokyo Highway! It was slightly chaotic and we all noticed that we mostly enjoy building stuff (…and maybe blocking others) and that scoring points is nice but not necessary to have fun. We followed that up with a totally different energy and played Klask! I don’t know what happened that night but it felt like gravity was different than in our own home because biscuits and the balls were flying through the room! It was great fun though – you can never really go wrong with Klask. Since we still had some time left, we went with the classic… Rhino Hero Super Battle! It was rather remarkable how long our structure lasted.

On Friday, we played the second scenario of War Story: Occupied France and I believe I can speak for everybody playing that we’re all hooked! The story is engaging and the tactical decisions are interesting. We’re not really sure if we would replay the game though, maybe after a few years when we’ve forgotten the details of the mission? But certainly not immediately.

Heinze continued working on his cool Turnip28 army and the oil-wash technique he’s using works really well with the slightly weird Turnip miniatures. On Sunday we played a relaxing game of Space Base. Ironically, this is one of those games that I win most of the time (87% win ratio at the moment) because I build less of a complicated engine and start scoring points earlier than Heinze does. So Heinze would need to add a little more urgency to his play style and he could probably win too.

This week we’ll be continuing Middara and we’ll be playing Zoo Vadis and maybe HEAT or even Colt Express? We’re not sure yet! There’s a date and there are people so whatever we’ll decide to play, I’m sure we’ll have fun. 🙂

You start thinking: how will I get anything done with so few actions? But during the game, you’ll quickly realize there are actions to be found in actions! Tableau-building games also tend to start slow at the beginning of the game and slowly build their way up to almost a puzzling number of chained actions! Other games that really do this are the deckbuilding classic Star Realms and also games like It’s a Wonderful World and Steampunk Rally! 

First, we’d like to say thanks for all the kind and supportive messages we’ve received, it was really lovely. It’s been a really hard week and it’s been weirdly silent in our house but we also know that we’ll slowly get used to it and that the grief will change into memories that’ll give a smile. Death is a part of life but it hurts, so we weren’t really in the mood for games last week.

We did play some small fillers and one game of Joyride Duel: Next Gen – but that was it, nothing to fill a blog post with. The week before that, however, we played a few very interesting titles that I didn’t discuss last week… so I’ll do that this week! The Weekly Recap video included in this post was from October 14th-20th and not last week (you might understand why we skipped last week’s Weekly Recap).

The weirdest game we played definitely was The City of Six Moons. It’s a game ‘discovered’ by Amabel Holland. It’s a game in which you’ll have to figure out what the game is. You get a box with components, cards, a board, tokens, and a rulebook but the twist is that there is no text in the rulebook (except an introduction telling that this game is from an alien civilization) – the rulebook solely has icons in it. Technically it’s a solo game but we’ve started to dig into it with four players and that worked well for us. We spent about two hours trying to decipher things and got quite far! After that, we felt a little stuck, wrote down our idea of how some parts of the game work, and left it there for next time. All of us are experienced board game players and it was interesting how everybody managed to identify different parts of the ‘puzzle’. It’s an interesting concept but the fact that there is no ‘solution’ to be found, might be frustrating for some people and that’s something to keep in mind if you ever want to give this a go. 🙂

We ended that evening on a lighter note and played a scenario of Big Potato’s choose-your-own-adventure-with-dexterity-elements game What Next? It’s such a silly fun concept! You draw location cards that tell a story and based on your decision and dangers you come across, you’re presented with challenges. These mini-games (over sixty different ones) range from knocking things (like cards for example) over with the items in the box, to blindly grabbing the right shape piece from a bag to solving small puzzles and many more we haven’t encountered yet. Most of these are timed or you only have a limited number of tries. This adds a fun and hectic element to the game and there’s also… the Tower of Peril. Each time you do something dangerous, you have to add one of the pieces to the tower. If the tower collapses at any point, you and the other players have lost the scenario. We enjoy the quirky storytelling and the lovely art and it takes only about an hour to play. Since we just played a dexterity game, we ended that night with a game of Viking See-Saw to keep that same energy going.

That weekend, we also played two games of Flatiron, the newest game by Ludonova that was designed by Llama Dice which you might know from another quite popular game called The White Castle. There was quite a buzz about this game before/at Spiel so we bought it on a whim without playing any demo. Flatiron is a tight two-player game! Just like in The White Castle, you have a limited number of actions, but that number will expand when you start adding action cards to your columns that you’ll activate during your game. You’ll have to accept that you won’t always be able to take the action you want because you can’t visit the same location twice and it might be blocked by the other player. During my first game I found this quite frustrating but having accepted it, our second play went a lot smoother. 😉

This week, we’ve got three game nights/days planned and we’ve got some interesting ones planned… Arcs and Dune: Imperium Uprising! We’ll tell you about it next week!

Sorry, no comic this week. Yesterday, we unexpectedly had to say goodbye to our best buddy Apollo at the vet. He has been a bundle of silliness, love, and joy in our lives for more than thirteen years and now…  he’s gone and there is a painful emptiness in our home that will take time to heal. It caught us off guard and we can’t fully comprehend it yet. We are heartbroken and we’re going to miss him so much. Please cuddle and hug your pets for us and enjoy their presence with every fiber of your being.

Just like Starbuck, Apollo will continue to be part of the comic in memory of him. ❤

(if you don’t have Instagram, you can also watch our Weekly Recap videos on YouTube)

We did bring home many games but they didn’t have the volume that we expected! There are a lot of smaller game boxes nowadays and we’re enjoying this trend. There are more shorter, smaller games, there is a noticeable rise in two-player games after the success of Sky Team and there are, of course, a lot of trick-taking games that don’t need a big box.

So last week we started with our new games and played quite a few of them! We kicked the week off with Joyride Duel and it was just as quick-paced and silly as we had hoped it would be. We had an exciting race with hilarious moments in less than an hour. Highly recommended if you’re into racing games (with a chaotic element).

On Tuesday we took it a little easy and played a game of Pina Coladice, Festival, and Can’t Stop. The first is a combination of Yathzee and Four-in-a-Row and it works surprisingly well! It’s quick, easy, looks good and it’s perfect when you’re looking for something light and small to play while having a chat. It is important to keep an eye out on your opponent though, before you know it they will have ended the game. Festival also is a casual game but it has more bite to it. Each player has their own grid on which they place tokens. During the game, you’re trying to complete and score objectives but the interesting thing is that all the tiles you’ve placed, stay on your board meaning you can use them to complete other objectives. Combine that with a stacking element and you’ve got quite a nice little puzzle going on.
We also played our first game of Can’t Stop, well, at least a ‘psychical’ version of the game. Can’t Stop is Can’t Stop, it’s a silly push-your-luck game that can be enjoyed by many. We also really love the foldable edition that we got.

To continue with the smaller dice games, we also played King of Tokyo Duel last week. Iello has given this game a nice vintage look that we’ve also seen with the Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze box and we’re digging this esthetic! The game itself is a very short push-and-pull game. In our first game, we used the characters with the lowest complexity rating but that fell flat with us. Also, one of the two simpler characters just had a superior special power compared to the other one which felt unfair. In our second game, we went with the more complex characters but even those didn’t excite us very much. We feel like the power cards didn’t really add very much to the game because we both went into ‘racing mode’ (you win the game if the two tokens on the track are in a certain area on your side of the board -or- if one of the tokens hits the end of the track on your side). We’ll have to play it a few more times to see if there’s more to the game than we now think. It plays very quickly so that won’t really be a problem. 😀

Later that week a friend who had also been to SPIEL, joined us and he brought the game Yatai with him! A game from a smaller Italian game publisher that we had never heard of. In Yatai you’re trying to run the best Yatai (small food stall) and it really felt like a cozy game. The actions you take feel logical (having to recycle things and take out the trash), cooking food, and serving customers. The customers you’ve served are then placed in a grid on your board to unlock extra bonuses or get good reviews that’ll give you more points at the end of the game. We found the action-selection mechanism very interesting! It falls in the category cozy game with a little more spice to it since you are able to send unwanted customers to other players’ Yatai. We ended the night with a game of Typewriter, a quicker/smaller version of Paperback! Having played a lot of Paperback it took a little bit of time to get used to this mechanic and we also found it hard to score points. A game we’ll have to get better at. 🙂

This weekend, we sat down to play some more Dead Cells (the board game). We have never played the video game but we are familiar with the rogue-lite concept of games. We are intrigued if a board game can give us the same feeling a video game can so we played three runs in a row. Every run we managed to unlock new cards/items and we got further in the level. Even when we entered a new area and we thought we would be dead after the second encounter, we somehow made it to the end of the area and reached the end boss (again). We’ve made four runs in total and we’ve reached the end boss twice now. We have the feeling it will take us at least another two or three runs to defeat him but that’s ok. We’re mostly very curious if the game will take any turns after the first end boss or if it’ll be a continuing repeating loop with different areas and enemies. So far, it really did give us that “AGAIN!”-feeling and that’s impressive. Looking forward to exploring this one more.

In the evening, we gave one of the cases of Crime Unfolds, the murder mystery pop-up book a try. We’ve mostly played really hard escape room-like games and we went into this one way too hard. Puzzles were lighter and less complicated than we expected, which in hindsight is quite funny – we should have seen that coming with a playing time of roughly 60 minutes per case according to the game. We did find that the solution of this first case was far-fetched though but we’re hoping that this is an exception. We’ll see!

On Sunday, we played a game of Floresta. We love how Mebo Games always makes games that are based on Portugal and this one is no exception. It breathes life and the illustrations are wonderful. The board does become a little messy in the end when it’s all filled up with trees and fire tokens (but maybe that’s just us not being very good at putting out the fire. ;-)). The gameplay is quick. Both players play an action card and after that, you continue to the fire phase – you get to remove fire tokens if you have a truck and fire will spread. Then, newly drawn cards will decide if new fires will added to the board and players take their actions again, etc etc etc. With two players, it felt like the game took a little too long and we are wondering if the balance of taking actions versus the fire phase, is better with three/four players.

And that was it! This week we’ll be playing significantly fewer games because we have multiple non-board games things planned but we’ll share that next week.

This week’s comic is a little late due to a deadline followed by a lovely case of Con Crud… oh well, it happens!

We made a short video compilation every day! You can watch all of them on our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/semicoop 

When we were at Spiel we noticed every conversation someone asked “What did you play today” and while you’d think everybody plays games at Spiel, we realised loads of people (including us) don’t really play games at the convention. That might sound strange but just let us show you how busy our Spiel days have been:

Wednesday was Press Day. We arrived in the afternoon to check out the novelties show, where most new games are set up on tables for the press to check out without the masses of visitors. There were a lot of games missing though, but it was nice to get a preview and scribble down which games we’d like to check out the following days. In the evening, we went to a dinner organized by Jay (CardBoardEast) and Justin (MeepleMountain) at an Italian restaurant. We’re used to ordering a pizza per person but we hadn’t seen that this restaurant served pizzas with a 45cm diameter! Oh dear! It was a fun night and we had lots of fun talking to Beeneta, Tim Chuong, and Banzainator! On our way back to the hotel we enjoyed the light festival in Essen.

Thursday was the first official day of SPIEL! We bumped into some friends and we joined them in a demo of the game Atoll by Albi, it’s a fun sealife-themed engine-building game in which you’re building a coral reef. After that, we had a meeting at Hopeful Games to try out their upcoming game Neon Hope. This was probably our highlight of the fair. We’d say it’s an Arkham Horror the Card Game-styled storytelling game without the deckbuilding hassle set in a Netrunner-like world. We really enjoyed our demo and the way the gameplay worked. We’ll share our detailed experience/opinion when we play the entire demo case.
We also had an impromptu meeting with Debbie and Rob from Wize Wizard Games and they showed us their upcoming new card game Draconis 8 which had us intrigued because the game works with decks of only eight cards which you’ll be able to buy in tiny booster packs. We said hello to some friends, had dinner, and returned to the hotel where we played a game of Dead Cells (it actually feels rogue-like!) and I played Hot Pot Holic and 1 AM Jailbreak while Heinze played a game of Fishing.

Friday was one of those days at Spiel that flew by! We came in a little later and mostly said hello to publishers who showed us cool things. We had a lovely explanation of City of the Great Machine and Key Enigma showed us their latest cool project which is a pop-up book escape game! We really enjoyed their escape game Hack Forward so it was cool to hear them talk passionately about this new project and what other projects they have planned. We bought some awesome meeple socks at our friends of Rood met Witte Stippen! We knew that Rory (from Rory’s Story Cubes) was demoing at the Eldfall Chronicles booth so we went there and had a lovely talk about the game and why he thought this was so good and how he consulted on parts during the development. After a long day, we retired to the hotel and played a game of Seaside and Dirt and Glory. We were joined by more awesome people and we played another game of Dirt and Glory which is a very fun take on blackjack, although we think it takes a little long with five players.

Saturday! Originally the busiest day of Spiel but not this year, because every day was sold out and busy. We picked up a copy of Gibberers after it was highly recommended to us and this is one of the games we have a perfect gaming group for. It’s a game in which you develop your own language and that sounded right up our alley. We dropped by the meet-and-greet event to say hello to some people and walked into a lot of friends and… people who actually recognized us while we weren’t part of the meet-and-greet (thanks for saying hi though! :D). It mostly was a social day and we ended up playing some short games in the hotel in the evening. Ian showed an upcoming game he illustrated called Sausage Sizzle (it’s adorable!) and we played Potato Tomato which was complete chaos but also hilarious. We also tried to play Bottle Imp with six players but we wouldn’t recommend that…

On Sunday we first tried some releases for next year with a publisher, which wasn’t planned at all but happened because we all stuck around after breakfast. Then we headed to the hall for three meetings, first with Scorpion Masquee who showed us a very exciting new project for next year and we visited our friends at Deep Print Games, which hyped us up for their seven(!) releases in 2025. Lastly we had a nice talk at Czech games with Eleni about social media and marketing, which is always nice as we’re always intersting in how people social media to hear what we might have missed or could change. Then it was time to head home with stacks of games!

These are all the games we brought home! We were gifted most of these games, so we put a * behind those we purchased ourselves.
– A Fake Artist Goes to New York *
– Battalion
– Can’t Stop *
– Calling Card *
– Compile Expansion *
– Crime Unfolds
– Dead Cells
– Dirt and Glory
– Eldfall Chronicles starterpack
– Festival
– Flatiron *
– Floresta
– Gibberers: The Word Game of Language Invention and Civilization Development *
– Gloomhaven: Bugs and Buttons
– Gosu X expansions *
– Guilty: Monaco 1955
– King of Tokyo Duel
– Middle-Ages
– Moving Wilds expansion
– Neon Hope (demo)
– Pina Coladice
– Ratjack
– Rebel Princess
– Seaside
– Seers Catalog
– Seti
– Sky Team: Turbulence
– Sandbag
– Sausage Sizzle
– Typewriter
– Xylotar

We have played some of them but we’ll be busy trying them out the coming weeks and seeing which ones are winners in our opinions. If you see anything you love (or our curious about) let us know, we’re still not quite sure where to start… 🙂

We couldn’t help ourselves after seeing the new CGE logo and this comic had to get out of our system. 😉 I like the logo though, it’s playful and makes it a little less corporate and the Galaxy Trucker character is versatile and can easily adjusted if they’d like funny custom logos.

Speaking of CGE, they’re releasing SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Spiel next week and we’re looking forward to it. We love a good sci-fi/space game and this one ticks a lot of our boxes. We’re unfamiliar with the designer Tomáš Holek but liked what we saw of the prototype at UKGE earlier this year.

Let’s return to last week. Now that Descent is finished, we’ve ‘officially started’ our Middara campaign and kicked it off by creating our characters and a shopping session (we did the tutorial a few months ago). So, ok, technically, we’ve not really started yet but from now on we’ll be playing it once every two weeks… for as long as we like it! We’ve had a good track record with completing Gloomhaven and Descent, so we’ll see if Middara can live up to those two.

We also played our first team game of Undaunted Callisto, which was really different from a two-player game! I personally might prefer it with just two players, but maybe it’s too soon to say that after playing just one four-player game.

And we played another Osprey Games’ game! One that we’ve been really looking forward to and that’s War Story: Occupied France. I would describe the game as a tactical choose-your-own-adventure game. It was interesting that no one at the table felt any connection to the characters we were using for this first mission. They almost felt more like assets to us. We first wondered if that somehow lessened the experience, but it really didn’t. The story was exciting and immersive and there was a very interesting balance between skill checks, puzzle-solving, and tactical decisions. At the end of our first game, however, we did realize the value of our ‘assets’ and that our agents were in fact quite squishy, meaning losing any one of them makes our future missions more difficult (we did lose one…). We were all equally impressed and are looking forward to the second mission.

Another new game we played is Tower Up, a game by Monolith Games. It’s a short lighter city-building game that takes about 45 minutes. There’s more to this game than meets the eye and we’d like to try it with three or four players to see how that changes the puzzle. The tricky part of the game is that in your turn, you can either pick a resource card or you can start a new building on the board. Whenever you place a building and it’s adjacent to any other building, you have to ‘pay the costs’, which means you have to stack another block on top of the neighboring building in the same color as those buildings. After that, you can place a roof on one of the buildings you’ve just added a block to. Just one of them. We quickly realized that once a building is completely surrounded, you can never place a roof on that building again!

This week it’s time for Spiel. Four (and a half) crazy days of masses of people and more board games being released than we’ll ever play. It’s going to be interesting! We don’t have many games on our “MUST-SEE” list this year so we’re going to let ourselves be surprised and see what we come across in the halls.

In case you missed it, we published an extra comic last week about Deep Print Games’ Roaring 20s!

We’re not native English speakers and with word games, my head sometimes goes a bit wonky switching between multiple languages (English, Dutch, German, French) except for the one we’re playing. Reading, for example, a rulebook does help combat that a bit. 😀 Playing the real Paperback at the table does feel like it’s way harder than playing the app version because the app has a built-in spell checker, leaving some room for ‘experimentation’ if you’re not sure if a word is correct.
But… since this 10th Anniversary Edition of the game has a card illustrated by yours truly, I’d better get used to playing the analog version because I’m looking forward to showing off the card to our friends! It’s so weird to have something you made included in a game but also really cool so I’m grateful Tim Fowers offered me the chance!

So last week, we played Undaunted 2200: Callisto and I must say I really like this version of Undaunted. Our two games have been really close and fun. The game feels more dynamic and exciting than the other Undaunted games and I don’t really know how to explain why. The setup time has decreased greatly now that there is a board for every mission. I cannot say what that will mean for the replayability at this point but we thought the first two maps were already interesting enough to play again. In our case, we’ll probably play through the entire game with our current setup (Heinze as the miners, and me as the Corp) and if we’re still up for it, we can switch it around. It’s absolutely a step up for me compared to the original war theme, big fan. 🙂

Most of the week, Heinze was away for work and our weekend was booked with social activities so we didn’t get to play a lot of games. But we did receive a copy of War Story: Occupied France which is a choose-your-own-adventure-like game that takes place in WW2. Ever since we first heard about it, we’ve been intrigued and are looking forward to the game night we already planned for it with a friend who was also very hyped.

Another interesting new game in our collection is City of Six Moons. It’s a game ‘discovered’ by Amabel Holland and it’s a strange one, which is perfect for one of our gaming groups. It’s a game without text. Literally no text at all, so that also goes for the rulebook. You’ll have to try and figure out what the game is by deciphering the symbols and try to make sense of the rulebook. This sounded like such a weird thing that we ordered a copy and can’t wait to stare at the contents of this box with a group of people trying to see if they can also discover the game. The best/worst part is that there is no ‘right’ solution, so you’ll never know if you got it right.

This week is going to be a little light on games again, but if we have the energy this weekend… we might just play a load of games to compensate. 😀

(note: you can also watch our weekly recap videos on YouTube if you don’t have Instagram)

Last year, we dragged along a deckbox filled with print-and-play games… but we never played them because our first hike in the mountains was more intense than anticipated. 😀 So this year, we decided to notch down the trail’s intensity a little and we went to the Mullerthal region in Luxembourg. We had planned to hike two of the three loops in four days, but due to a little injury at the end of day one on my side, we took it a bit easier the following days and we ended up walking route 2 and half of route 3. We were surprised to even come across a tiny board game store in Echternach called The Meeple Monastery! Those board gamers are just everywhere. 😉 If you’d like to see more of our hike in Mullerthal, I’ve also made this short hiking-only video with a bit more footage.

But as the comic suggests, we did play games besides hiking a lot! Our most-played game is Circle the Wagons because of how quick, simple, and fun it is. Another one of our favorites is Confusing Lands, which no longer is a PnP-game but now has a physical release! Skulls of Sedlec is also a charming fun game that we played a few times and we played one game of Liberation, which I do like the clever game design of but I was a little too low in energy to nail the memory part (mostly remembering which cards the other player has played) and that made it feel frustrating. Not the game’s fault, just not the right moment for it. If you’d like to learn more about the games, we’ve discussed them in these two earlier posts.

This week, we’re excited to play Undaunted 2200: Callisto and we received our Kickstarter deluxe edition of Paperback that contains a card I designed (aaaah!), also looking forward to playing that. 🙂