Posts authored by Rachel

Seasoned Gamers

Seasoned Gamers published on 1 Comment on Seasoned Gamers

And it’s time for guest comic number two, by Annika Heller! Annika was the perfect candidate for doing a guest comic for us, since, besides being a talented illustrator, she also works at a board game cafe! And that surely gives her enough memorable experiences for comics and I love the comic she made!

A few words from Annika herself:

Hi, my name is Annika Heller and I’m an illustrator and designer from Hamburg. When I’m not drawing I’m working at Würfel and Zucker – Germanys biggest board game café – to get in contact with real people and especially board game enthusiasts! I also really like comics (even if I haven’t produced many myself) so Semi Co-op combines two of my favourite hobbies!  I love learning new games and if they are about communication, getting to know people in a unique way and are beautifully illustrated, chances are high I’m a fan.

Of course my work at a board game café inspired the comic. It shows a very common situation: People come in and claim they are pros and high functioning board game fans which gives you as their guide the chance to explain something more advanced, maybe something you recently discovered and love. You get excited and start making a list of games you could recommend in your head. And then they start raving about Monopoly and the disappointment is real.

I’d love to illustrate more board games in the future, so if you’re an author, looking for someone who’s into the topic:
Feel free to contact me via mail (info@annika-heller.de), Twitter (@rotkopfchen), Instagram (@annikaheller_illustration) or my website annika-heller.de, I’d love to hear from you!

Having free time is fun, but somehow it also just flies by way too quickly! We’ve been away from home a lot last week and done a lot of cool things, but not really played that many board games. We might just do that this week! We did, however, find an expansion of Seasons that we’ve been looking for for years! The irony of the matter is that the expansions of Seasons have been reprinted and will hit the stores in a few weeks, but nonetheless, we feel victorious! It has been a ritual of ours to visit board game stores in other cities and look for the Path of Destiny expansion, but it was always sold out. But now we have it, and even an “original” copy, hah! Now we just have to think of a new ritual…

Have you ever visited a board game cafe?

Ad Rocker

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This week’s comic is the first of four guest comics! I proudly present this comic about Gaslands, drawn by Mariecke Kouwenberg. 🙂 Besides being friends, Mariecke and I go way back and went to university together and after that, we were both artists for our own mobile game company called Firedroid. She is an amazing illustrator and I am so happy she was really down drawing a Semi Co-op comic and she totally rocked it (pun intended).

A few words from Mariecke:

Hey, my name is Mariecke Kouwenberg and I’m a friend of Rachel and Heinze. As a casual board gamer I mostly play Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (when we get to it 😉 ) and Eldritch Horror, but I’m an avid video gamer next to my job as a videographer. This is my first Semi Co-op comic and it was a ride.

After eagerly opening the reference files and comic setup Rachel had sent me, I discovered the board game I would be drawing was Gaslands (which I’ve never played). Apparently that meant cars. Vehicles. I can’t draw vehicles! I better do some proper research by rewatching my beloved movie Mad Max: Fury Road. It was truly a burden. I better watch it twice, just to be sure. Poor me.

Joking aside, I had a lot of fun drawing my version of Rachel and Heinze’s characters (and even my own), experienced a decent amount of stress about the deadline (art is hard), got out of my artistic comfort zone (cars, baby) and gained even more respect for Rachel’s comic-making skills.

Now if only I had a muscle car in real life…

Next week, I’ll hand over the stage to Annika Heller!

Do you play music while playing games?

Roll no write

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I’m sure that there are creative and ingenious ways to make a tool that can write when you’re out and about, but it just would have been easier if you’d a pen or pencil with you. 😉

This comic is vacation-themed and that’s with good reason! I’m taking the rest of August off to recharge and prevent getting a burn-out because of working way too many hours every week. But luckily, you will hardly notice that Heinze and I are taking some time off. 😉 Our sketchies will continue updating weekly on Wednesdays as usual and we’ve arranged really cool guest artists to take over the coming four comics on Mondays! We’re super excited to share our stage with other talented people and to see how different our characters will look like. Hype!

When we called out for guest artists, we’ve got a lot of replies from artists and even more than the four slots that we had to fill. So we might do more guest comics in the future if it is convenient with our schedules. The coming four weeks, you’ll see comics made by Mariecke Kouwenberg, Anni K. Ninchen, Jan Jaap Sandee and David S. Livens.

But that’s in the future. This past weekend was GenCon, but we were way too busy attending GenCan’t. 😉 We embraced the advantages of not going to GenCon and organized a high tea game day yesterday. That meant a lot of delicious food, good tea, and fun games as you can see in the pictures. We started off in style with a game of Dinosaur Tea Party, followed by Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell where we drank a lot of tea visiting connections and going to fashionable parties! After a scone break outside in the garden, it was time for Cat Lady… because, cats! We continued on to another excellent game to play while enjoying a cup of tea, Dragon Castle. After a light dinner, everybody was ready for a bigger game and we let go of the high tea theme a little and we’ve played Great Western Trail. We ended the night with a light game of our own custom made Love Letter. A great start of the vacation I might say.

What are your favorite games to take along on a holiday?

Overruled

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Heinze should know better than to get on an artist’s bad side. 😉 But it’s true, the undo-command is certainly something I use a lot!

Undo is a puzzle type game in which you try to change the past and prevent the death of an individual. We haven’t played it yet but the premise sounds intriguing and we love one-time puzzle games, especially when you don’t have to destroy components, because then you have a great experience to share with friends!

Let’s talk about what we played! We’ve continued our Gloomhaven campaign and we are now 26 games in. We’re starting to see some patterns how side stories are set up over multiple scenarios but it’s still a lot of fun. We doubt we’ll ever finish the whole campaign but so far it has been really cool and we’ve been playing it more than we expected at the start.

We also tried the first scenario of Undaunted Normandy, a deckbuilding WW2 war game by Osprey. The first scenario is a training scenario but has us interested in trying it more, the design does a whole lot of cool things with a minimal amount of rules. The game was also really quick, which is not something that we normally expect with wargames.

For this week, we’ve got some fun game days planned continuing our Charterstone campaign, playing some Aristea and probably some Wingspan. With our vacations coming up we’re also thinking about playing some bigger games that take all day, but those plans are still in an early phase and we don’t want to jinx it! 😉

Do you have some vacation time this summer? and which games do you want to play during your time off?
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