We’re aware that in parts of the world, like in India, Covid is still raging and what’s unfolding there is devastating. Beneeta Kaur and AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps have done an amazing job on running a Twitch stream raising money for Covid Relief in India, raising over 17.000 dollars. We’re so impressed by their hard work and everybody who has participated and contributed to this amazing result! If you want to donate to India’s covid relief, you can do so here: https://gnfa.breezechms.com/give/online.

On the other hand, vaccines are slowly being administered all around the world and for a lot of people, that means that game nights can be a thing again! But it’s been quite a long time since we’ve had these strange social gatherings with groups and games and so we thought it would be good to remind people of some things that are different from playing games with each other digitally. 😉

It’s going to take a little while longer for us before we can have gaming days and nights with gaming groups again, be we simply can’t wait to play and share amazing new games with our friends. And… continue our game of The King’s Dilemma that has lain dormant since February last year! :’) Here in The Netherlands, they’re expecting that most people will have been vaccinated somewhere in August, so we’ll just have to be patient a little longer.

Last week, we haven’t played a lot of games. We were kinda obsessed with the TV series American Gods which was very interesting since Heinze has read the book and I haven’t – so it’s a different experience for the both of us. We’ve just finished the first season and enjoyed it a lot.

This weekend, we did play two new things! First was a Dutch escape room game called “Het Boekanier Dossier” and that was fun. We did apparently missed/skipped quite a few puzzles but still came to the right conclusion to the story. Whoops!

And we played the preview copy we received of the expansion Tall Tales for Ruthless. We think that Ruthless is one of the better deckbuilding games out there but few people know about it. The expansion comes with six modules that you can mix up with the base game and we’ve played with about half of them now. You can read our first impression on our Instagram page. The expansion will be on Kickstarter, you can sign up on this website if you’d like to be notified when it launches.

Games can make you a certain way. When we’re playing a game of Lost Ruins of Arnak, we feel like cool adventurers, exploring and finding treasure. When we’re playing games like Hive and Onitama, we feel cool and calculated. But… when playing heavy economic games like Food Chain Magnate, for example, we both often have no clue what we’re doing. We don’t play them very often, that certainly helps. 😉

Speaking of games we do understand, Villagers! Sinister Fish was kind enough to have us on as guests playing Villagers, with the upcoming Shifting Seasons expansion, live on their awShux stream! We played together with Dave, the owner of Sinister Fish and Haakon, the designer and Rachel won! While we hope we get to play with Dave and Haakon at a con someday it’s also nice to know Rachel has a 100% win rate playing Villagers against the designer of the game. Click here to watch it!

Other than that we have completed the It’s A Wonderful World War or Peace campaign which was fun and we’re looking forward to trying the Leisure and Decadence campaign when it comes out in retail. Or… if we can’t wait, we’ll order it from La Boîte De Jeu’s website. 🙂 We also tried Mandala Stones which is a nice abstract game but we’re going to try it a few times more to see if it is a classic or just a fun game. It does look incredibly pretty so if you like pretty games with few rules but hard decisions, you should check it out.

And in non-gaming news, since we haven’t been able to go bouldering for over four months now and the weather is starting to get better, we’ve started slacklining! We’re still not really good at it, but it’s a ton of fun. Have any of you ever done this? And we’ve found a freely accessible outside boulder wall on the grounds of our local university and that certainly was a highlight for us this past week.

This week, if everything goes right, we’ll get an advance copy of the upcoming Ruthless expansion which has got us excited. We always thought the pirate themed deck builder does some fun and different things which makes it unique, so it will be cool to see what designer and illustrator Roland has done to make his game even better. We’ll let you know!

Ahh, the eternal question… what game(s) would you take to a desert island? My personal opinion diverts from that of my comic’s character. I think most people would go for a gigantic game like Gloomhaven because the more content the better? Somehow I also see the charm in taking a compact game that can be played on basically any surface, unaffected by weather elements like the game Hive. Then again, the option of having a solo-option might also be handy…! Preferably, I’d just skip the desert island. 😉

Last week we reached a new milestone on Instagram, 14k followers! That is a lot of people if you think about it, even more people than that live in the city I grew up in. Crazy! But honestly, even though we are sometimes frustrated by the platform’s algorithms, we’re enjoying sharing our board gaming adventures there and love the lively community.

We also got a surprise in the mail that we’re really hyped about: we got the expansion and campaign for It’s a Wonderful World, a game we both really love. The campaign (War or Peace) will have to wait a little longer since we don’t want to play that with just the two of us but we can’t wait to play more games with the Corruption & Ascension expansion. The expansion dials the game up to eleven with more extreme and advanced cards, making the engine building even more fun.

Game-wise it has been a varied week! Obviously, we’ve played It’s a Wonderful World, but also a second session of Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods. We’re not completely sure what we think about the game. Sometimes it’s really creative and original, but other times it can feel slightly sloppy. We came across one puzzle that we had the correct answer to, but it wasn’t according to the app. Luckily, you don’t get any penalties for when this happens, but it did throw us off a little. However, we do have the feeling that the story is about to get interesting, so we definitely are going to finish the game since there is still a lot of content that might surprise us.

We also played Megacity Oceania, The King is Dead, Umbra Via, Netrunner, and a game of Cubitos last night! We can only conclude: geez, there are a lot of good games out in the world.

I’m going to have to keep this week’s blog post short because time is my nemesis… a shared nemesis with many other people I think. 😉

This comic is based on a tweet by Calvin Wong Tze Loon because, well, he was totally talking about us! Whenever we see a picture with game boxes in there, we always try to spot what games they are! This is also a lovely thing to do when video conferencing if you’re chatting with people that are into board games.

Last week was a very diverse week! We finally managed to buy a copy of Wildlands Ancients, the big expansion for Wildlands. One of the things it adds to the game is a co-op mode in which we’re really interested! We’ve only played it once and it was hard! We’re curious whether that was due to the combination of ancients we were using or if it’s just always that much of a challenge. We’ll see in future plays! We played a game of Wingspan, which is always relaxing, some Ticket To Ride: Amsterdam, Village Green, and Mandala, which are all highly recommended shorter games.

And… we played Netrunner! Yes, that’s right: NETRUNNER! Project Nisei has sparked our old love for Netrunner and we decided to build some (new) starter decks and just play it again. The last time we had played it, was back in 2017… gasp! The people behind Project Nisei are about to release a new starter pack for people who want to play Netrunner but can’t because the game is no longer in print. We’re so excited that the community behind Netrunner is still thriving – if you’re interested and would like to play a game, you can play it for free on Jinteki.net. 🙂

We participated in PinkAndGeek’s challenge and a real highlight was joining Bez her Friday stream! Bez is such a lovely person and we can’t wait to be back in their stream one day! If you’d like to see us chat away with Bez and her fun audience, check out last week’s Friendly Friday Forum episode!

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. 😉