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. 😉

We’re super enthusiastic about the rulebook of Lost Ruins of Arnak, we enjoy it so much, that we agreed it deserved its own comic! After we’ve read it the first time, we just knew how to play the game and we didn’t need to check the rulebook at all during the game. We only check the backside of the rulebook during setup to see what the starting tokens are for the players. Compliments to Czech Games Edition for this rulebook! It looks good, it’s logically structured, and has the right amount of text and visual examples to make the rules easy to absorb.

Last week was a little bit weird. There are some things playing in our personal lives and I felt kinda drained. Nonetheless, we still played a game almost every night and that honestly surprised me! We kicked off the week by playing High Rise. We hadn’t played it in quite a while and we really enjoy this economic game by Gil Hova, plus it plays quite quickly (about two hours) with just two players.

On Tuesday we played some relaxing Dragon Castle! It’s funny that this was the first time we’ve added one of the extra modules (spirit cards in our case) to spice up the game a little. So far, we just didn’t think the game needed it to be fun, to be honest. The next day, we continued our Imperial Assault campaign that we started the week before and once again we were reminded: sometimes it’s way better to make a run for it than to defeat all the enemies on the board!

On Thursday something exciting was delivered! Our new table! Our old table was quite narrow, which often was a hassle with games with a bigger centerboard and player boards. We now have a table that’s 180 x 100cm and that feels like a perfect size. I’m sure it’s still not big enough for some games, but we just don’t have the room for a bigger one or one of those fancy game tables. The first game we played on the table was Hive, still one of my favorite smaller games.

We also played Lost Ruins of Arnak and we’re still amazed by the game after playing it for the fifth time. It somehow just clicks with us. I did lose the first four games, but this time, I finally won my first game! Hah – may this be a turning point for future games! On Saturday morning, we played a game of Chai, with a nice cup of tea, of course.

Now for this coming week, there will be a brand new Sketchie comic available on our Patreon on Wednesday. If you’re not a patron and reading this, for just $1 a month you’ll get access to the new Sketchies and you get to support our comic for which we would be very grateful. 🙂

Next week, we’re finally going to present our Golden Standees of 2020! We’re about a month later than usual, but then again, these are weird times and we’d still like to give away our silly awards to people/games/things in the board gaming industry. Better late than never!

Last week we’ve updated our Patreon page. We’ve changed some of the rewards and we’ll start making our Sketchie comics again for our patrons! For only $1 a month, you get access to brand new extra comics and you get to support our work so we can keep making comics every week! We would really appreciate it if you’d consider becoming a patron, thanks! <3

I mean, cats… Especially Starbuck in our case has the tendency to want to be the center of attention and she often finds it hard to share the attention with a board game. But how can you say no to that face? 😉

Last week flew by, honestly, I can hardly remember what we’ve played. Luckily, we’ve got an app for that! We played a scenario of Gloomhaven, making it our 41st play…! Honestly, does anybody know somebody who actually finished the game? We’re determined to finish it, but we’re also wondering how many years it will take us. I think there will even be a successor to Frosthaven by the time we finish Gloomhaven. But, we’re still having fun with it and that’s impressive.

We also played a relaxing two-player game of PARKS. Ever since we’ve played it with four players, we now realize how non-aggressive the game is with just two players. I still can’t believe how amazingly pretty everything in the game is.
Our adventure in the stone age also continued and we finally beat the fourth scenario (it took us four tries in total)! The day after we played the fifth scenario, which turned out to be suspiciously easy after the previous one. We really enjoy Paleo and frankly think it’s one of the better co-op games out there and we can’t wait to introduce it to other people once we get to organize game nights again. We play the game with just two players, which we think works fine, but everybody is stoked about playing it with 3-4 players.

What else did we play…? Oh yes! The King is Dead. We had played this with three players and really loved the experience. This weekend, we wanted to give it a try with just two players. The game doesn’t disappoint, but in our two games, the tie-breaker decided both times who won. The last player seemed to have an advantage in setting the final board state, so we focused too much on passing, just to be the last in the game. We’ll give it a try with the advanced card deck and see how that works for us. Otherwise, we’ll just save it for when we can play it with three or four players!

We ended the weekend with Onitama, which is one of those almost iconic games that definitely replace chess for us. It’s quick, it’s different every time and it looks impressive.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! With our country still being in lockdown, it was just us and the cats on New Year’s Eve. Normally we’re not really party people on the last day of the year, but this year, we saw no other people and we just stayed inside and played some games and watched some TV. Fireworks were prohibited this year, but people clearly ignored that and there were about as many fireworks as every year.

So we ended 2020 with having played 343 games in total, that’s ten more than our previous record! Our top We show some of our stats and our top 10 most-played games were:

1. Tiny Towns
2. The Crew
3. Gloomhaven
4. Mansions of Madness
5. Mental Blocks
6. Quirky Circuits
7. Abandon All Artichokes
8. Ghost Adventure
9. Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam
10. Coup

You can see more detailed stats and our highlights of the year on our Twitter account if you’re interested!

Last week has been nice and relaxing and we enjoyed a full week without any work at all! We’ve played… Gods Love Dinosaurs, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, Abandon All Artichokes, Tiny Towns, Lego Creationary, Mansions of Madness and Cubitos. We’re giving away Lego Creationary to friends and wanted to play it one last time and we’re not sorry it’s going to go. We think it might be really good with children, but it didn’t work for us. 🙂

We played two scenarios of Mansions of Madness and those were a lot of fun. We really enjoy the creativity of the different scenarios and we always just have a good time playing this almost RPG-like experience.

For now, it’s back to work and we’re looking forward to the new year, we have awesome plans for Semi Co-op and there are so many awesome games to play. We wish you all the best for 2021! 🙂