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We talked about Fisheries of Gloucester before and we couldn’t help ourselves and make this joke… I mean, have you seen the logo of Dr. Finn’s Games? 😀 

So last week has been a busy week with four game nights! Tuesday was our Descent night and we continued the campaign, we enjoyed this scenario and we’re impressed at the variety the game has to offer! Thursday we planned to play the unplayed copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill (3rd edition) of a friend. It’s always a bit chaotic in the middle of the game when the players and the betrayer have to ‘learn’ the new ruleset when the Haunt begins but I assume that’s something that’ll go more smoothly after a few plays. The last time we played Betrayal was at least six years ago and the other two players had never played it before but luckily, the game is really simple at its core and it almost feels like a party game from time to time. We ended the night with Hanabi, another game I don’t even remember how long it has been since we played it!

On Friday morning, Heinze tested a prototype of Robin David, the designer of games like Letterpress and Luzon Rails. I can’t say very much about it, except that he said he had a great time! In the evening, it was time to get our brains working. A friend got himself a copy of Threads of Fate, which is quite an impressive puzzle game. We also played the Wilson Wolfe Affair together a few years back which was slightly too complex. Threads of Fate was more doable for our slightly tired minds on a Friday night and solving one puzzle doesn’t take multiple hours. Another big plus of the game is that it’s divided into parts 1 – 4 each taking about three hours to solve. We liked the puzzles and like that they used an existing dataset meaning you have to search for answers online for some puzzles. We’ve already got the next night planned and we’re curious if the difficulty of the puzzles will increase or will stay about the same.

On Saturday, we made pizza and played a game of Artisans of Splendent Vale! We love the game’s concept and how detailed the world is but the thing is that we do not really like the player characters. We’re still having a great time with the game itself and will keep playing but the characters are currently our biggest struggle. And since the scenario that we played was a little shorter, we had some time for some more games. Let’s just say that our mood was kind of ‘derpy’ so we got out the good stuff: Fish & Katz and two games from the Brick Games from Itten Games, Viking See-Saw and Stick Collection. Each of them silly, but a great time.

On Sunday we played two games of Aqua: Biodiversity in the Oceans, a game we’ve played five times now but we’re still unsure what we think about it. The game is trickier than it presents itself to be and that’s mostly because of the way the tiles are designed. We’ll probably play it a few more times to see why the game doesn’t seem to click with us as much as we thought it would or maybe it’ll start to click! We’ll make sure to share our thoughts on Instagram.

This week will be a little less intense than last week, although we do have a game of Battlestar Galactica planned, looking forward to that!

What’s the most cutthroat game you ever played?

 

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We have been culling quite some board games and there are even a few empty spots on our shelves at the moment! Ahem, not taking the pile of games that we’re trying to find new owners for into account, of course.

It had been a while, but we visited our favorite (and local) gaming store Comicasa! Since we’ve regained space, we picked up a copy of the Heat expansion Heavy Rain and we came across the Dutch edition of Sea Salt & Paper! Just kidding, we would have gotten those either way. 😉

Sea Salt & Paper is one of those games everybody has been talking about but we’ve never played it. We somehow expected it to be a trick-taking game but it’s not! Love the art, the simplicity and the fact that a round ends when one of the players announces it (if they have at least 7 points). They can either just end the round by saying “stop” or if they say “last chance”, everybody gets another turn, and scores of that round will be compared to the person that said “last chance”. If that player scores more points than any other player, the other players lose their points and only get a few for the number of cards they have collected. If any other player scored more than her/him/them… OUCH. The player loses their points that round. So far, we’ve only played it with two players and are quite curious if it’s different or better with more players.

We’ve also played other games this week. We started by playing The Fisheries of Gloucester. The game is so tight. It’s easy to block your opponent, forcing them to spend precious hours (action points) just to move further away from the coast to get to the fish. I must say, I do think it’s a great game and worth looking into if you enjoy confrontational two-player games.

We also played Kutná Hora: The City of Silver. It’s one of those games we think we could play in under an hour with just the two of us, but setting it up also takes 15 minutes, so we’re in the market for an insert for that one! 😀 After four plays, we still really enjoy it.

We also played our first game of Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze and I must admit we were amazed. We felt like two-player Unmatched lacked depth but the co-op version of the game really hits the right spot for us! We’re looking forward to playing it again this week and try it with friends.
We ended the week with an old favorite of ours: Kombo Klash! We still think it’s a mystery that the game scores quite low on BGG and that it hasn’t gotten a bigger fanbase or was picked up internationally by other publishers. The mysteries of the board game industry…

In case you missed it, we published an extra comic last week about Lumicora!

board games can also function as…?

 

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Always take a look at what you’re about to eat! 😉

Last week was a super stressful week because of a chaotic project deadline, but despite that, lots of different games got played! Normally, we have board game night with a friend every other Tuesday and although I was working late… that still meant games for Heinze! They played some Tinderblox, Match of the Century, and a game of Unmatched. I can’t tell you how it was, sorry! :’) Since it was at our place I joined them at the end of the night and we played a game of Akropolis. Akropolis was a big hit at Spiel a few years back and I’m quite surprised that I don’t hear about it more often. It’s a solid game!

We also got an exciting package from Deep Print Games, but I won’t tell you anything about that yet. But we’ll definitely have to plan an entire day to tackle one of the two prototypes that were delivered… phew!

After my deadline later that week, Heinze and I finally played our first game of Unmatched! We played the Houdini versus The Genie characters that came together in a box.  The game is not too complicated and has some nice elements but I’m not yet sure if I really like it as a 1 vs 1 game. We’d have to play it a few more times and try some other characters. However, I do think this might be better with four players and I am looking forward to trying the co-op version, Unmatched: Tales to Amaze!

And this weekend, it was finally time for something that was planned a long time ago… a game of Stationfall! The game was even more quirky and silly than I had imagined. It’s a BIG game with so many variables! To be honest, it’s not even that complicated but there’s just a lot that can be done in the game. The fact that there are 15 characters on the board with six players that all come with their own “rules”, says enough. 😉 I won’t explain the entire game but it comes down to this: You’re on a space station together that is crashing down to earth and every player gets assigned two characters in secret, you pick one as your character and the other will be their best friend/enemy. All the characters on the board can be activated and used by all the players during the game (as long as nobody has revealed themselves to be a certain character). All the different characters have their own scoring conditions! Some, like the monkey, will want to escape disaster with as many shiny things, others mostly care about taking down as many human or non-human characters as possible and the Legal robot only cares about getting NDAs signed to cover up everything that went wrong on the space station. It could be anything. Since you don’t know who played who during most of the game, everything seems suspicious and it makes for great stories and silly situations. We’ll definitely be playing the game again now that we know the works a little.

On Sunday we played a quick game of Ticket to Ride: San Francisco before… going to the cinema! I was really looking forward to Dune Part Two but maybe if I had seen a trailer in advance (I didn’t on purpose), I could have known that the scale of this movie was different from the first movie (no, haven’t read the books either). I loved the relatively slow pacing and simplicity of the storytelling of part one. The second movie is quite different and won’t share any spoilers, but this felt rushed and would have been more enjoyable spread over multiple movies. It wasn’t bad and you should watch it if you liked the first movie! But for me, it wasn’t the masterpiece the first one was.

Which game pieces look the most eatable?

 

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Trading card games are there and back again! I speak for both of us that we’re not the biggest fans of TCGs and have a preference for the Living Card Game format. If you’re not familiar, the difference is that TCGs (like Pokémon or Magic) sell packs with random cards called boosters while the LCGs (like Netrunner or Arkham Horror: the Card Game) sell specific sets of cards, there is no random element. That being said, who are we kidding and let’s address our real problem: we just don’t have time to invest in a card game, trading or living, right now – we still have plenty Arkham Horror the Card game and Netrunner packs lying around that we never touched. :’)

As you can also see in our Weekly Recap we did play some games and even some surprising ones!

Heinze finished and won an online game of 18ChesaPeake, as far as I heard it was a really tense and close game until the very end! We played a game of It’s a Wonderful World and Triqueta (with the Wolves expansion) with a friend. I don’t think I ever had a score as high as this one, I ended up scoring the triquetas of all the animals except for the lowest-scoring bunnies. I believe it was around 50 points, huzzah!

Later that week, we had another game night and a friend introduced us to the game Attika which looked rather vintage, haha! But despite it being an older design, the game is simple and fun enough for a light game night. The many many tokens on the tiles make the game a little unclear and we were surprised that there were no tokens in the box to mark on your player board which buildings are already built (you need to know this for unlocking bonuses) – but luckily our friend brought a big bag of cubes that solved that problem.

A few days earlier we also received an exciting package from Iello Games, containing Unmatched: Tales to Amaze game and two other Unmatched sets. This is one of those games that have always looked interesting but we never really looked into. So when Iello asked us if we wanted to try the game, it was a big yes! It’s a shame we didn’t have the time to play them yet, hopefully, we can make that happen this week after a big work deadline of mine on Thursday. :’)

Since I work from home, it was time to really get out of the house this weekend and we took a long hike of 17 kilometers from train station to train station. Despite it raining the first half, we had a great time and the route even featured a foot ferry with a hand crank which you don’t see that often anymore. 

I have no clue how many games we’ll play this week but… one thing’s certain, we’ve got a six-player game of Stationfall planned this weekend and that’s going to be exciting!  

Are you team TCG or LCG?

Another comic in our based-on-a-internet-meme series! Other comics in this series are “This is My Hole!”“This is Fine” meme, that “Trojan Horse” one, the “Star Wars” one, and that “One in the bus with different views”. 

 

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This one is based on “Kombucha Girl” and is an often-used meme found all over the internet used for all sorts of topics. This was my actual expression when Heinze read that there would be a new anniversary edition of 6 Nimmt!/Take5! and my immediate thoughts were “We have a perfectly fine copy so I’m not interested.” but then, the article also said that the game comes with a co-op mode… And that’s when the “Nope, don’t need it”-expression changed into the “Ohh, what now?”-expression. We’ll see if curiosity will get the best of us when the game comes out.

While on the topic of co-op games, we were talking the other day and we have the feeling that there isn’t much movement in the top ranking of co-op games and we couldn’t really name any big new co-op titles (other than story-based/crime/dungeon-crawler type of games) either, besides Sky Team, which was a great hit last year. Luckily, there is always enough to explore that’s already out there. I’ve been really curious about the Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition  – Crisis expansion, which makes the game co-op. On the other hand, I like the game as it is, and would a co-op experience improve it? It’s probably better to first try a co-op experience of a game that we think might improve by playing it co-op: Tiwanaku. At least when we’re playing it with just the two of us. The game comes with five smaller scenarios which are great but it also comes with fifteen bigger scenarios that just… work not as well for us. We do enjoy the game, the deduction and strategic placement elements, and the cool puzzle wheel – honestly, it’s fun! It also comes with a co-op variant and that might solve our issue. We’ll let you know once we’ve played it!

Last week, we didn’t play many games besides Tiwanaku and only got around to playing a game of 5 Towers. 😀 It quickly became clear that this game is probably best at a higher player count, so we’ll take it along with us to a bigger game night but we see the fun shenanigans it has to offer. This week is more promising for board gaming! We’ve got our next Descent game scheduled and a game night with six players on Friday! We haven’t decided on what to play yet. Heinze will be topping that with a game of Warhammer 40K and a game of Feudum this weekend. Curious what he’ll think of the latter.

‘Take 5!’ or ‘6 Nimmt!’?

We were surprised when we saw this article on DiceBreaker that the most created character was a human fighter named Bob. Haha! We shouldn’t be too surprised since we have a friend who had a D&D character called Bob, Holy Bob to be precise as he played a cleric. Roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons should have room for silliness so please everybody feel free to ignore our critique, and on the plus side, it’s way easier to pronounce and remember Bob than names like Alagaësia, Chathanglas, etc!

Talking about silly names, we continued our Descent campaign this week, and our group is called “Eleven Days”. In a previous blog post, we wrote a little about how we came to that name. We’ve now played ten scenarios so we’re still not past those eleven days! 😉

 

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The rest of the week, Heinze and I had separate game days for a change. I spent a night with friends while Heinze was off and we played multiple smaller games. We started off with the classic BANG! Although we were all also quickly reminded that the game is not really at its strongest with just four players since there is one sheriff, two outlaws, and a renegade – so it doesn’t take a mastermind to quickly figure out who has which role. That takes away a bit of a charming element of the game, so we’ll remember that for next time!

I also played the game Papertown for the first time. I see the potential of the game, but playing it with four players made the game very random. Maybe it’s better with a lower player count but with four, it’s hard to plan anything and most of the city will be blocked, making it really hard to fulfill the conditions so you can finish a special structure. What I did like was that when you fulfill a “contract” (always a combination of 3/4 tiles showing a park, lake, residential/industrial/commercial area, or a public building) you put one of your meeples on the tiles that are part of your contract. You also get to flip one of these tiles and the meeple that’s on that tile is locked for the rest of the game and cannot be removed and the tile can’t be used by other players. When another player uses one of the face-up city tiles with another player’s meeple on it – the meeple is returned to its owner. Since the game ends when a player has placed all of their meeples, this makes for a cool tug of war.
We ended the night with a game of Yogi and you can never go wrong with that.

This weekend, Heinze played another 18XX game with five players. 18Mex took them six hours, but… for the very first time in history, Heinze won! Since I wasn’t there and I’ve never played an 18XX game, I can’t elaborate too much on it. He did write about the game on our Instagram account.

Any fun names from Roleplaying games you’d like to share? 😀

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I enjoy a game with a good insert that stores all the loose game tokens, it looks so nice and organized when you open up a game box… IF, it was stored horizontally and not vertically. Since we live in The Netherlands, we like to travel by bicycle the most (stereotypes are there for a reason!). That means bringing board games in cycle bags, which are great but means your game(s) will get shaken a lot while vertically orientated. Any inserts without plastic covers will be useless in these cases. 😀 I guess, in the case of mindlessly storing and transporting games, the plastic baggies win over most inserts!

Speaking about games that just don’t need an insert at all, we played quite a few games of Triqueta last week with the new expansion Hidden Wolves. We already liked the base game, it’s a great push-your-luck game and it gets even more interesting with this expansion! The added two-player variant surprised us and works really well. If you’d like to learn more about the game or the expansion, you can read more in our Instagram post!

Our game of Descent was changed into a game of Robot Quest Arena because we ended up chatting a bit too long before starting a game. Which is totally fine, it’s always fun to play Robot Quest Arena! But having played it with three people,  I do think the game is at its best with at least four players instead of just three.

And this weekend we played another crazy game of Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City. I promised to share some pictures once we put those online, so here they are. The non-slip pads on the road pieces really make that you can build some crazy things in the game, we love it! The Kickstarter for the game launches tomorrow January 23rd if you’re interested in checking it out!

Which other games should you not store vertically?

While we were explaining the rules of Nucleum to friends of ours (who are fans of heavier euro games) they immediately started referencing other games to understand the mechanisms quickly. It’s funny how often you do this with board games if you have played a lot of them and it really does help with grasping the concept of a game quicker. It doesn’t make a game less creative, I actually think it’s important that there are “recognizable” parts for players so they know what to expect beforehand. Learning how to play Nucleum took us two hours and about an hour to explain to our friends and that’s with game mechanisms that we are familiar with, I don’t want to know how complex a game gets if you’re unfamiliar with any. :’D

Last week was a busy week with other things than board games so we ended up only playing one game and it was a new game that was sent to us called Fisheries of Gloucester! When we were asked if we were interested and we saw that it’s a game by Steve Finn, that immediately caught our attention. We’re big fans of one of his other games, Biblios, and that’s also the only game of his that we have played so we wouldn’t mind changing that! It’s a two-player game about fishing and it was a lot ‘meaner’ than we initially thought, haha. The most tricky part of the game is time management. There are six days (rounds) in the game and you only have a limited number of hours to spend during a day. So moving one of your ships forward one square on the sea takes an hour, taking one of the fishes from the board that are adjacent to one of your ships takes an hour, and moving through rough sea or passing another ship takes two hours! The basic variant of the game board also creates some interesting funnels at the start to get to the fish, making it tricky to pass other players and giving options to block your opponent.

During a turn, you can Chart a Course, Sail, Fish, and Preserve Fish. Before a ship can sail into the open ocean, there needs to be a water tile adjacent to it. This costs no time, but it does take up your turn and these explored ocean tiles can also be used by the other player. Sailing is just moving one of your three ships but there’s a small catch. Your ships form a fleet and this means they can never be more than four columns apart from each other on the game board. There’s a handy little cardboard piece that you align with your leftmost ship and that clearly shows how far out your other ships can be. You can collect fish on your player board, but you can only “Preserve Fish” once per day, which means you can only exchange fish tokens for victory points and other handy bonuses (like TIME!) once. It’s details like these that spice up the game.

We really enjoyed our first game and think this is a nice game for people who like two-player games like Raptor, 7 Wonders Duel, Radlands and Cryptid: Urban Legends.

Hopefully, we’ll get more games to the table this week. We do have a game of Descent planned and another game night on Friday so that’s promising. 🙂

What’s your most memorable game teach?

This comic is a terrible in-joke and only funny for people who have played the game Heavy Rain (2010)… sorry. I just couldn’t resist and had to get this out of my system ever since we learned that the new expansion for HEAT would be called Heavy Rain.

Since Heinze is a teacher, he always has the first week of the year off and I decided to ‘join’ him and that meant, like the week before, that we had a lot of time for games! Having had this much time for ourselves has been a blessing and we really enjoyed a week without any festivities or other obligations.

 

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So, what did we play? Well, first off we finally had a date for playing Nucleum. It was a beast to learn and it took Heinze and me about two hours to go through the entire rulebook to understand the game and it took about an hour to teach it to our friends the next day. But, wow, it was worth it – what a great game. It took us, as all first-timers, about five hours to play. We’re sure we can shave off a chunk of time the next time we play but it’ll still take an entire afternoon. We’ve also decided we’re just going to play it with the four of us from now on because we all know the rules now and we don’t want to teach it to other people. 😉 Luckily, our friends really liked it as well. You can read our full first impression here on Instagram.

We also received a game that we’ve been really excited about and that it is… Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City! It’s officially called an expansion but you can also play it as a stand-alone version, which is perfect since we had never played Tokyo Highway before. It’s one of those games we’ve stared at a lot and have always been fascinated by and when Itten Games contacted us if we were interested in a copy because they’d like to get the word out about its upcoming Kickstarter. So far, we’ve played it with two and with four players. It was fun with just the two of us, but it was hilarious with four players and just pure chaos. It also comes with “Mission Rules” which makes the game more interesting because the game isn’t just a race in which player places all of their cars the quickest (or lose if they run out of columns) but you score points based on different missions on the mission board like circling a building, have the highest column, have an exit on certain locations, etc etc. We think this will work for a lot of gamers. Once we’ve made a post on Instagram with some pictures, we’ll also share it here.

This weekend, we introduced Root to two of our boulder friends and because they were new to it and it had been quite a long time ago since we played it, we decided to stick to the base game. The Woodland Alliance won and I think that we all wouldn’t mind giving it another go. I forgot how light the game feels, with the emphasis on ‘feels’ because it is a complex game due to all the different rulesets per player and there are always a lot of specific situations that require clarification from the rulebook. But… turns don’t take long and the player boards are an excellent guide through every turn.

We also played our first game of Cat in the Box and that game might have instantly become my favorite trick-taking game. There are a lot of trick-taking games and I think some of them are great games, but in essence… they’re the same while Cat in the Box really is different in a fun way. You can read more about it here on our Instagram if you’re curious.

Earlier that week Heinze also played a game of Warhammer 40K and we played three games of a game we cannot talk about yet, so that’ll have to wait. 🙂

Are there expansions you’re looking forward to?

You can’t have ‘the’ conversation with the young ones too early! 😉 Shoutout to Mark from Ludocherry whose comment was the inspiration for this comic!

We did it, we’ve had a week in which we played zero board games! The stars aligned and plotted against our board gaming hobby and we had already seen in our schedule that we were busy every night of the week with other things than board games. Oof!

What things did we do then? I’m not sure if this is interesting, but ending the blog post here feels wrong. 😉 Once every two weeks, we play a multiplayer game with friends and right now we’re deep into a co-op game of Anno 1800. There’s an option to play as a single player in the game with multiple players and this leads to a super relaxing version of the game in which development goes really quickly since four people are doing all the clicky work instead of one. The downside of Anno is that it’s ridiculously addicting and time just flies by too quickly. It’s a good thing we all have jobs and have a reason to stop playing or else we would be playing until the early hours every time.

We’ve also been busy with another hobby of ours, next to bouldering, and that’s fiddling with synthesizers! We’re trying to plan a synth night more often in the future with a friend to do some jam sessions together and to fiddle around with all the cool technology that makes all kinds of bleeps and bwops. Our small victory this week was linking all the different synths through Ableton so there’s a shared BPM (beats per minute) and that we got the big mixer unit working and recording. The actual music-making is something we have to learn, besides Heinze, he’s actually already quite good at that… (very jealous here, haha).

And yesterday, we had a super relaxed afternoon with nice food and painting miniatures. We’ve learned that that’s a great and creative activity to do while also having a conversation in the meantime. So that’s been a wonderful way to meet up and do something lowkey in the meantime. Looking back at weeks such as this, I guess I’m mostly very grateful for all the wonderful people that we hang around with and whom we can share our interests with.

This week, board games are back on the menu, boys! We’re hoping to play Tiwanaku and we have another game night planned tomorrow. We might play Descent or something else, we’ll see! Heinze has a night of D&D later this week and we’ve got nothing planned this weekend, so that’s good news for our card board interest. Looking forward to it. 🙂

Any holiday gaming plans?
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