There’s been a lot of buzz around Rap Godz on Twitter because of an incredible fundraising action that was initiated by Danny and it raised over 80.000 dollars!  Amazing job everybody! We’re glad we could help out and contribute a little to a good cause.

Last week, we’ve mostly been playing shorter games and more Tiny Towns… because.. we’ll join in one of the AEG live streams this week (on Thursday, if all goes well) and we would like to have played the game a few times before that and don’t look too silly on the stream.

This weekend we’ve been mostly busy celebrating my birthday! Today’s actually my birthday, but we’ve been having some family over, spread out over different “timeslots” during the weekend. And luckily, the weather was good and we’ve got a garden – which makes the social distancing easy. I’ve been spoiled to bits by everybody, so even though social restrictions, it’s been lovely.

And that’s it really, no exciting news to share. 😀

Really, don’t put too much pressure on yourself and take care! For quite a period we both experienced that we were just too tired at the end of the day to just do anything. To learn that new game, to initiate that cool idea we had for Semi Co-op or anything creative, somehow we just couldn’t and that was frustrating. We also quickly learned to accept it and that whether you “actively” notice it or not, the changes to normal day life just takes a strain on you.

I’m happy to say that we are slowly getting back up again though. Last week we’ve The Crew, Agricola, Godtear and this weekend we played our first game of High Rise – it arrived, hurray! And the game looks glorious. It looks way more intimidating than it is, we were both surprised by the quickness and relatively simple rules of the game. In many ways it reminded us of Parks and Tokaido, only you’re building buildings in the process and get bonuses if you or another player stops to take an action at your building. A big part of the available actions players can take are randomly drawn tiles, which makes us very curious about what our next experience will be!

AEG was kind enough to send us a copy of Tiny Towns and Space Base and in the afternoon we’ve played Tiny Towns. The game reminded us of roll and write like games, placing the right resources in tetris shapes on your player board until you can place a building there. What we’re really enthusiastic about is the variety between games. Our second game was completely different from our first because the building cards are picked randomly in each category. Again, a game that we think offers a lot of replayability and we’re looking forward to playing again (also: it’s nice and short!).

Ok, ok, technically, this comic is not really board game-related, but it’s a joke that had been lingering in my head for a while. And since I can’t and won’t do this in real life, a comic will do.  😉
The rulebook that is being read in the comic is of High Rise by Formal Ferret. Our Kickstarter delivery came last week and it looks amazing! The box is huge and it really stands out with the beautiful art by Kwanchai Moriya, who has made a few of the most pretty box covers I’ve ever seen. High Rise is a longer game to play, so we’ll have to wait until we have time on a weekend to play it, hopefully soon!

Another delayed Kickstarter delivery came in today, Root: the Underworld expansion! We know it’s been really stressful for Leder Games, so we’re really glad that the Kickstarter fulfillments are now being delivered all over the world. 🙂 At this point, we only regret we didn’t back the AI boards, since we don’t get to game with friends at the moment. So the expansion will have to wait before we can really play it.

In other news, an interview with us has been published in a Dutch national newspaper last week! It’s mainly about us, our lives, and the silly things we do, like running Semi Co-op. You can see a bigger version of the picture over at our Facebook page and you can also read the article online (it’s in Dutch though!). The photographer did an awesome job on the picture and even capturing an action shot of our cat Starbuck.

This comic secretly (no, not really) is a wink to our previous Undaunted comic, which you can read here:
https://www.semicoop.com/comic/friendly-fire/.

We really enjoy playing Undaunted: Normandy and we can’t wait to play Undaunted: North Africa because we’re really curious about the new setting and scenarios and of course the addition of vehicles!

But since it doesn’t come out until July, we’ll have to wait a little while longer. Last week we’ve played another game of Scythe Digital and nobody was kicked out because of timers running out his time. 😉 And Heinze and I played some smaller two-player games like Watergate and Onitama and we’ve played our first game of The Taverns of Tiefenthal! We’ve been wanting to play that game for a long time, but we just didn’t have the energy to pick up a new game and learn the rules. It turns out it’s a pretty easy game and after playing our first game, we can’t wait to try it again and add some modules to enrich the experience.

On Sunday, we’ve spent most of our free time on building our own tiny bouldering training wall! We’ve “built” the wall plate and now have to paint it, put in the t-nuts, attach it to the wall and fill it up with climbing holds. We’ll share the result on our Instagram account if anybody is interested.

Dungeons and Dragons is a game that can be played in many ways! Some people really enjoy the fighting aspect and others enjoy the storytelling part and the latter can make all the difference. I do understand that if you’d add this much story to all the actions in a fight, a simple battle encounter would probably take all night – so I can imagine that is a tricky thing for a DM to balance.

But a little “fluff” text does help with transporting you into the imagined world. It’s actually the same with board games! In a game like Elder Sign for example, which is really is all about rolling the right combination of icons with dice, the fluff text on the cards really helps take you into the Arkham world. That’s something we really appreciate about most Fantasy Flight Games, even though it might just be a single sentence on a card, it gives context to the item/character in the game world.

Speaking about a game with a rich setting, we’ve started our second scenario of Forgotten Waters! We think the game is a lot of fun, but there is one downside to it and that is the playing time. Even though the game only gives players 40 seconds (in total!) to decide on their actions each round to keep the playing time down, we once again did not complete the scenario in one sitting and had to “save” the game halfway. It’s great the option is there, but we were looking forward to also playing the game with friends once the lockdown is over and if it takes five hours to complete an entire scenario – we’re afraid it won’t end up on the table that often. Other than that, we do think it’s a really fun game and we’re looking forward to continuing our adventure soon.

We’ve also played more board games online! First off, we tried On the Underground on Tabletopia! The gameplay is relatively simple and that makes it perfect to play online. We did find out it might not be the best game to play with severe color blind people though…
Yesterday we’ve played three games of Smallworld with friends after buying the Asmodee Digital Humble Bundle! Other titles we’re looking forward to trying online are Potion Explosion, Carcasonne, Splendor and, of course, Scythe!

We’re entering week four of semi-lockdown and we actually seem to be adjusting a bit better to the situation. We both had a little more room to relax from work which helped to create a bit of order in the chaos and also meant we had a little more time to play some games.

We played Mysterium using Skype and Whatsapp, which worked well although we lost in the end. We used Whatsapp to send over the dream cards and Skype to have the much-needed discussion and the handling of the voting round. If you skip the voting round you can play it over WhatsApp or social media without any problem so that might be something fun to do with some friends if you have a copy. Next week we’re trying Flash Point, which is a great game that we have not played in a long time so we hope it will work well.

We also played Azul with just the two of us, which remains a classic and we tried to win the second scenario of Mansions of Madness twice to no avail. We’re happy to report playing the scenario for the third time was still great so replayability doesn’t seem to as much of an issue as we feared. We are looking at expansions though, because we want to have a little more choice in investigators and more versions of the same spells to keep the choice to use a spell a little more exciting.

We also had a great time on the Tea & a Chit Chat Livestream with Dave and Russ from Chits and Giggles. We met Russ and Dave last year at UKGE and we’ve kept in touch since then. We talked about tea, deciding on what comics to make and our own game collection. If you want to see it you can check it out over on the For Chits and Giggles channel on Youtube.

Today we’re trying out Tabletop Simulator with some friends, we’re not sure what we’re going to play but there seem to be a lot of our favorites on it! We’re hoping on a good first experience because there are a ton of games on there which we wanted to try for quite a while. 🙂

Yes, Heinze and I do both play Animal Crossing, but no, we certainly haven’t given up on board gaming. I think Animal Crossing is a fun game, but not something I would want to play hours and hours every day, Tom Nook is going to have to wait a while for me to pay my debt. 😉

Something we did play this weekend that took about three or four hours was Mansions of Madness!  It was an intense scenario and our escape was burned… right before our eyes and we lost the scenario. But what an experience that was, we’ve had loads of fun and can’t wait to try the scenario again now that we know what to expect. The only thing we’re trying to decide is whether to play with just two investigators or scale it up to two investigators per player.

We also played the Devil’s Kitchen scenario of Chronicles of Crime last night and we really enjoyed it. At one point we thought we knew the solution until we learned about one small detail and that changed everything! It was great our hypothesis turned out to be correct and we managed to answer all the questions.

With no actual gaming nights planned or legacy/campaign games for us to continue, we do get a chance to play some games we otherwise would have played very often, I’m really curious which games we’ll play this coming week. We’ll often name five or six titles and if one of us doesn’t have a preference, we let a die decide which game we’re going to play, so I guess you’ll read next week what the die decided!

We were watching “Ready Player One!” this weekend and the movie is all about finding hidden things and that led to a discussion that with board games there is little room for creativity. And that means that nowadays if there’s something hidden in a board game, it’s under the inlay or there’s a hidden bottom in the box. The very first time we encountered it, it was really cool, but by now the novelty has worn off a little, for us at least. 😉

Last week, we continued our adventure in Gloomhaven and this weekend was dedicated to games that take a little more time to play!

On Saturday we gathered all our grunge looking cars and terrain for a game of Gaslands! Jeroen who we only knew via Instagram/Twitter even drove all the way to our house to join the game and Mariecke, who drew this amazing guest comic, played her first game of Gaslands… and won! Her buggy sprinted off while her other car just caused mayhem and destruction to all of the other cars, effectively.

On Sunday we continued puzzling our way through The Wilson Wolfe Affair. We were kind of overwhelmed the first time we opened the box and although we did solve some puzzles (we think), we didn’t have a clear overlapping picture. This time we’ve laid quite a groundwork. We made a timeline, made a document about all the involved characters and their roles, and gathered all the clues we found that might turn out to be useful for other puzzles. We also ended with a few leads that we want to investigate the next time we play – so far it’s been a really fun experience and I hope we manage to keep cracking puzzles without needing to use any hints.