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Posts authored by Rachel
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It’s sometimes very easy to get a rule slightly wrong and that can affect the fun of a game immensely, without knowing that you might just have played it incorrectly. This mistake in Pandemic is quite an often made error made by people, I believe we did this once as well in the first time. On the top of my head, I can’t really name any structural mistakes we’ve made in games, but maybe you have a juicy one to share in the comments. 😉
A game in which we did get the rules right, is The Networks, which we played that last week with five players! It’s still such a great and funny game and is very unlikely to ever leave our game collection. In The Networks, players each run their own TV station and have to buy shows, ads and TV stars for their programming. All the shows in there are either completely random, like “Unlocking your cat’s psychic potential” or are a parody on existing shows. Every time we’ve played it so far, everybody at the table is just having a lot of fun even though it’s quite an economical game and that might not be everyone’s idea of fun.
And this weekend it was (finally) time again for our D&D session! Our party is currently in an ancient Dwarven city that doesn’t want to be in contact with the rest of the world and we ended up clearing some mine shafts of stone golems to gain some trust there. Now, we all thought we were doomed when it turned out the stone golems dealt around 22 damage with each hit, with us being level 3 characters… (eek!) But we somehow did manage to beat them and survive. Hurray!
This coming week is going to be hard work to finish everything that needs to be done for Spiel next week! We already made some fun appointments with publishers which we are looking forward to and our schedules are a good combination of free time and meetings. We’re so looking forward to it this year!
Have you ever disliked a game only to figure out you’ve been playing it wrong?
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This week’s comic features one of our patrons, Nancy! If you’d like to have a cameo in one of our comics, you can support us on Patreon and you might just win it.
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About the comic, this is based on truth, I could show you a screenshot of my Whatsapp and all of these groups are there. :’) There’s a lot of overlap in who is in there and the titles are mostly based on what game we’ve played or which game we’re trying to get on the table. But our common problem is that of most adults: time.
Something I forgot to mention in last week’s blog post is that I bought some really nice board gaming jewelry at Tabletop Gaming Live. I have been looking for more subtle silver jewelry and we found it when we came across the stand of Kasasagi Jewellery! This is not a paid sponsorship or anything, I’m really just enthusiastic about her stuff and would like more people to know about it. Supporting each other as small creators is important. It also gave me a fine excuse to test that 24mm F/2.8 lens that we have for taking some nice close-up shots. 😉
Last week just flew by! Before we knew it, the weekend had already arrived and good for us, we actually had some time to play some games on Saturday and Sunday!
We received two new games from our friends at Osprey Games and we’ve played them both. First up was the Judge Dredd version of Wildlands called Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter and this version of Wildland has fixed some of the design flaws and changed some tiny things. We’ve posted our first impression on Twitter if you’d like to read it! We really like Wildlands so we’re looking forward to exploring what this new box has to offer.
The other game they send us was something we had never heard of before, a two-player asymmetrical card game called Embers of Memory – A Throne of Glass Game. We’re unfamiliar with the book saga, so all the pretty teen characters on the cards mean very little to us. Nonetheless, we were really surprised by the game mechanics and we had a lot of fun with the tutorial and the first scenario. It’s unlike any game we ever played before and being puzzled by this we did some quick research and learned that this is a re-implementation of The Ravens of Thri Sahashri. They’ve added a scenario deck that will change and adds rules as you play through the story of the game. So even though we had to chuckle a little at the art, with literally every character (no matter how evil) look like 18-year-old supermodels, we’re still looking forward to continuing the game. It plays quick and it’s a fun puzzle to solve together. Although, not really together since the players can’t discuss tactics with each other.
We also played Symphony No 9 (finally)! The game surprised us! It’s a lighter game than we thought and the theme is weirdly fun. Also slightly dark since you’re actually planning the demise of famous musicians by making them work themselves to death. We’ve posted our first thoughts on Twitter if you’d like to read more. The only downside to the game is that it’s really not colorblind-friendly, so chances are really slim we will get to play it often with many of our friends being color blind…
That’s it for now, this blog post has become just as long as the comic itself! 😉
How do you organise game nights?
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Our dear followers on Facebook and Twitter voted for Architects of the West Kingdom as the purchase of our Amazon gift cards and we are very grateful for their excellent taste! We’ve played it with just the two of us and also with four people and the game really shines at four players. It’s nice and quick with just two, but certain elements of the game like capturing other players workers and handing them over to the guard tower for money is just way more interesting with multiple players.
We also think that the game has very little to do with being an architect and more to do with being a mob boss. 😉
Yesterday, we returned home after being in London for a couple of days. The main reason that we were there was a wedding party, but we also included some board game-related things in the end! We visited our first board game cafe ever, namely, Draughts in Hackney! Better late than never, right? We don’t have that many board game cafes in The Netherlands, at least not in our area. At least not the ones that offer different games than the more old-school games like Ludo and Scrabble. So this was our very first experience and it was a lot of fun! We met up with Russ from For Chits and Giggles, who also works there and was the manager for the night and with Alex who will be working for the new hip YouTube channel Dice Breaker! We had a lovely night and played Qwinto, Blue Lagoon and Flamme Rouge, all games we hadn’t played before!
On Friday we just roamed the city of London and on Saturday we attended Tabletop Gaming Live. It was a smaller convention than we are used to going, but that was actually really nice and the location was in a beautiful hall in the Alexandra Palace on top of a hill looking out over the city of London. It was spacy, not too crowded and thus we got to say hi and talk to a lot of people and we even played a demo of Time of Legends: Joan of Arc and a prototype of the game Continuum by Play For Keeps. With Spiel coming up very soon, we decided not to buy any new games. We did, however, pick up the Noir expansion of Chronicles of Crime and are looking forward to seeing what puzzles the game has to offer us next.
Do you know other games about jobs that require a different skill set than you had expected? 😉
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We thought, with all that gaming jargon being used nowadays, it would be handy that we would make a little guide to what some of it means. (Disclaimer if you’re not that deep into board games, we’re just goofing off.)
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I think it’s great that there are so many different types of games available at the moment. And whether you like Monopoly, Munchkin, Catan, Exploding Kittens, Cthulhu Wars, Wingspan or whatever game, we’re all “real gamers”. And don’t ever feel discouraged or judged by people saying otherwise, the most important thing is that you’re having fun.
Speaking of gamers, it’s almost time for Spiel in Essen – there will be a massive amount of gamers there! We received our press passes last week and we’re so looking forward to this weird five-day event filled with board games and cool people.
And to train us for those very intense days, we’re also visiting Tabletop Gaming Live this coming Saturday in London! We were actually going to be in London for other business and we didn’t even know that there was a convention. So we freed up our schedule on Saturday and we’ll be roaming the halls during the day. On Thursday night we’ll be visiting Draughts in Hackney, so if you’re in the neighborhood and would like to say hi: feel free to come and join us for some drinks or even some games (depending on how many people are there)! 😀
Last week, we finally managed to free up some time for playing this weekend! That has been a while. We played a diverse pallet of games with What Came First, Architects of the West Kingdom, Aristeia and Silver and Gold. Glad to be playing some games again. 🙂
This coming Wednesday, it’s time for the Autumn Prize festival over at our Patreon page! We’ll be giving away fun prizes like a shirt or tote bag from our merchandise store or an appearance in one of our comics. If you like our comics and you’d like (and are able) to support our work financially, you can consider becoming a patron! There are different benefits for different tier levels and you get early access to our comics and with every change of the season, we’re giving away some cool stuff. We don’t make any money with our weekly comics, so we really appreciate the support of our patrons. 🙂
Which description of board gaming jargon did we forget?
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Yes. It took us more than four years, but we’ve finally made a comic about Carcassonne!
I’ll be very honest with you, I think I’ve only played Carcassonne once or (maybe) twice in my life and I remember the farmer-rules being quite tricky. It’s probably not even that complicated, but that’s what I remember of it. Nonetheless, that was enough inspiration for this comic 😉
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So, Tuesday we received our copy of Architects of the West Kingdom and the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit. The first thing I didn’t expect, was the small box of Architects of the West Kingdom! But everything fits in perfectly, so compliments to Renegade Games. We also played it and it’s so quick! Even though it was our first play. I expected it to be a more heavy game, but it’s actually a fun combination of game mechanics we’re both very familiar with so it was really easy to get started. It also turned out to be a close call since we ended up with a score of 31 and 30 (no clue if those are “OK” scores in the game, but it’s fun if it’s a close call ;-)). I think we could easily finish a two-player game in 30 – 45 minutes, so that’s a big plus for us since we’re more likely to also play it in the evening. We’re really curious how it plays with 4 – 5 players and what that does with the playing time, how chaotic it gets on the board and if you’ll capture other player’s workers more often.
We also gave the D&D Essentials Kit a try and that meant I had to DM for the first time. Deeeaar goodness, I’ve mostly learned that being a DM is very hard work. Since we tried a two-player D&D session, we got to try out the sidekick system. It was interesting, but it’s also kinda tricky to involve that NPC in the game. It’s a character, but I found it hard to also roleplay that character while my head was trying to figure out what to do. 😉 I’m sure that I’ll look back at this first session with a big grin after playing some more games.
Is Carcassonne A game you still play or is it a game from the past?