Spiel has an interesting range of ‘mascots’ this year… Lion would totally fit the group. 😉

Sorry, no blog post this week since we’re off hiking in a (hopefully) lovely place called Mullerthal. We wish you all a wonderful week!

We received an early copy of Undaunted 2200: Callisto last week and we cannot wait to play it! When the Undaunted series began, we started making bad pun-comics about the games (number 1, number 2, number 3) but at one point Osprey released so many Undaunted games, that we let go of the format. But with Callisto, we’re happy to revisit it, haha.

We’ll let you know what we think once we can play it! Speaking of games on the to-play list, we played Daybreak last week! We have to say it’s a fun co-op game. The game looks a bit more intimidating and complex than it actually is. The most interesting part is the balance between the different parts of the world that players represent. You can play as the USA, Europe, China, and The Rest of the World and together they must try to combat global pollution while also keeping up with the local demands. Playing as ‘The Rest of the World’ it was interesting to see that I had a way higher population growth than Europe and the USA, making it harder for me to get rid of polluting forms of energy than it was for them. That forces players to really get into the co-op part of this game and be considerate of other player’s situations. We were surprised that the map on the main board doesn’t really have a function except for a few tracks and the gameplay reminded us of Let’s Go to Japan a little! At least the way how you’re creating rows of cards in your own player area and the use of icons to activate certain abilities. But: we liked it! We did win the first time playing it (four players), so next time we’ll add event cards to make it harder.

We also played Compile, a new game by Greater Than Games and I think I’ve said it before here, but that game is great! We really like how much game is in the tiny deck box with room for expansions.

This week, we’ll FINALLY finish our Descent campaign (hurray!) and we have a story game-themed night planned, I believe we’re going to play Atma: a roleplaying card game. That’ll be fun! The rest of the week we’ll be busy preparing and packing for our hiking trip next week.

(note: you can also watch our weekly recap videos on YouTube if you don’t have Instagram)

In Netrunner, players often draw cards from each other’s hands thus it’s important to shuffle regularly. I once played against somebody at a tournament who was doing it constantly and he told me that that was something he developed while playing Magic during his teens. I’m glad I’m not a true compulsive shuffler but I can truly imagine it being a thing with all these trick-taking games nowadays.

We’ve had three game nights/days this week! On Tuesday we played an upcoming game we cannot tell you anything about alas, but we thought it was cute and clever. Once the NDA has lifted, we’ll share more about it.

On Thursday night, we played a few games of Caution Signs and Love Letter. Everybody was in the mood for light games and our friends were curious about Caution Signs. And again, we have to say that everybody has really enjoyed playing the game so far even the ones who think they’re terrible at drawing! We ended the evening with a couple of games of Love Letter and not just any Love Letter, but the one we designed almost eight years ago for our wedding guests. It’s not Semi Co-op themed but it was just a fun little art style experiment. I still really like how it turned out!

This weekend we went hiking some more to train for our hiking vacation (need to get those kilometers in!) and did a lot of gardening. On Sunday, a friend came over and he and Heinze played an old version of Through the Ages. They started a simple game but did not finish it because they thought it lacked depth and one player was so far ahead that continuing for another hour would not be fun for either of them. After some homemade pizza, we played three games of Biblios! We’re still quite shocked that this version of the game doesn’t exist anymore and that Iello has ‘replaced’ it with “For the King (and Me)“. We’re glad we own the old version because we think it’s almost perfect even though I’m really bad at it, according to our statistics I’ve only won it once of the 24 logged plays, hahaha.

Sometimes it’s a mystery that we didn’t think of a joke/comic before. I mean it’s been almost nine and a half years of comic making! :’) Want to use the Bingo card yourself? Here’s a random digital version!

This week, we thought we would finish our Descent campaign, but it was already 11 PM on a Tuesday and the app notified us that we were about to enter the last battle of the finale. We decided to save the game and finish it next time, which will be in two or three weeks. Then, we will finally begin our Middara campaign! Looking forward to it.

We also played another co-op game of Aethermon: Collect but we cannot seem to beat our own high score which we set the first time we played it at the UK Games Expo! Luckily, the game takes about 15 minutes to play so we’ll just keep on trying. 😉

Friday night was game night with a group of six and we played an interesting variety of games. Everybody was a bit beaten by work so we started the night of light with Big Potato’s newest game Mini Game Party (very confused that this is not on BGG). The game consists of 101 different silly ‘games’ or activities with the contents of the box. Now, the interesting part of the game is the way how the teams are formed. Teams are decided every round by flipping a card saying, for example, “Android or iPhone”, “Zoo or Aquarius” or “Cats or Dogs”, players take their two-sided token (blue/red) and vote on which team they are on. Ending up as the only member of a team isn’t too bad because it also changes the scoring to your benefit. If team blue has five members and team red has only one player, the blue team members score only one point each if they win the challenge, while the member of the red team gets five points (equal to the number of team members of the other team). It’s silly, it’s fun and it doesn’t take long to play, excellent!

After that, it was time for something more substantial and we grabbed a goldie-oldie: Steampunk Rally! The game’s still fun but we shouldn’t wait another three years before playing it again. :’D We ended the night with a new favorite that makes everybody laugh: Caution Signs. The drawing game in which it really doesn’t matter if you can draw or not. Twenty seconds is just too short, period, but that’s also what makes it hilarious.

On Saturday, we played Chaos in the Old World! This game went a lot quicker than last time (a few weeks ago) but my Horned Rats really didn’t get a chance to get rolling. It was a combination of a failing strategy and being decimated by Khorne who was very lucky with the dice rolls. Ouch!

We have a few nights with friends planned this week but I’m not sure if it will be gaming nights. We’ll see! 🙂

We played Whirling Witchcraft with a friend last week and they won by a landslide but also concluded that they thought it was a game you had to play a few times to form strategies and get really good at it. :’) We’re not sure if there is THAT much tactic involved in Whirling Witchcraft but if they want to play it again we’re all up for it cause we really enjoy the game! It’s a perfect easy-to-learn game with the right balance between ‘doing your own thing’ while also having interaction with the other players. The game’s sometimes sold for ridiculously low prices like $5 in special sales of AEG… We think that’s way too low but I guess that’s how the market works nowadays (even though the game is only three years old).

Last week, we also put together the Folded Space Root insert, reducing our collection to ‘only’ three boxes! More importantly, we can now find things without having to check all the boxes! It was also a reminder that there’s still a lot of Root content we haven’t explored yet. We could almost organize a Root weekend dedicated to trying out all the different factions and special add-ons like the Hirelings… By the way, the insert was easy to assemble and we really like how lightweight the foam ones are. We’ve made some inserts of our own from wood and those really add some pounds to the game boxes.

We received a copy of Lumicora! We made a commissioned comic for it earlier this year but we hadn’t played the game and we now can! We’re looking forward to trying out this game by Rita Modl and the good part is that we already know the rules since we studied them intensely for the comic.

Talking about ‘older’ games… we also played Flash Point: Fire Rescue and I played my very first 18xx game, 1830: Railways & Robber Barons. A friend has all the maps of Flashpoint Fire Rescue and we just cannot win the plane map. It always feels like we’re ‘mopping with a running tap’ as we like to say in Dutch which should be something like ‘putting a sticking plaster on a wooden leg’ at least that is what Google tells me. 😀 Maybe we’ll have to look into strategy guides for this one…

On Saturday it was time for 1830 and that was quite the experience. We started at 11 AM with a short rule overview and we finished at 8 PM with a short lunch and pizza break in between. It was a fun game day but I think I have to conclude that a six-player game of 1830 is not for me. 😉 I remember looking at the time around 4:30 PM and thinking: if it’s done soon then it wasn’t too bad..! But it turned out it wasn’t done for quite some hours and the game was getting rather repetitive. I had a great time with great company but in the future, I’ll pass if somebody proposes to give it another try. And let’s be honest, the game is probably better with a lower player count anyway. 🙂

ONE LAST TURN! …. please?! It’s an aspect of games with a racing element that can be frustrating when you think everything was perfectly aligned for that one last turn you had planned… but it never came. There are also enough other games that try to make sure that everybody has the same number of turns before scoring and I think I prefer that with a long game that requires a lot of planning and thinking.

Last week we visited the press event of Dutch publisher 999 Games. They’ve recently moved into their new ‘office’, but oh boy I’d call it an HQ (it’s so big!), and invited people to visit to check it out and show what games they’ll be publishing this year. It was a mighty impressive building with a big warehouse and a beautiful gaming space (and cantine) on the top floor. We’re glad business is going well for them!

Games we played were Intarsia, Nunatak: Temple of Ice, and the new game in the Pick-a-Pen series called Hackers. And we might also have played a prototype but we cannot share anything about that.
We had already seen a sneak peak of Intarsia last year at Spiel and it was great seeing how well the production turned out. The wooden pieces really had a flush fitting and it looked beautiful! The gameplay is quite simple and we’d like to say its complexity level is comparable to Azul. We believe Intarsia is going to be a BIG hit at Spiel this year.

We also played Nunatak and although we had a fun time it’s not a game we would add to our collection. There was a lot of luck involved with four players and I could see that might get frustrating. It feels like a great family game but our first impression was that it was not for us and there are other games we would rather play.

Pick a Pen has been a very successful new game series for 999 Games but we had never played one. They are roll-and-write games in which the colored pencils are also the dice and seeing the chunky pencils I understand its popularity. But alas, we quickly discovered that the game is not colorblind-friendly so we will have to skip that one.

On Sunday we played the party game Ransom Notes! It’s very easy and silly fun! The game comes with over 800 word magnets and players will have to form short sentences describing whatever that round’s instruction card says. It could be things like “Ask a child in the airplane seat behind you to stop kicking”. Since you have a limited pool of words to choose from, you’ll have to get creative and you cannot create a good sentence. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of Cards Against Humanity and even though this game checks some of the same boxes, it feels more creative and less steering into a certain direction.

As you might have noticed, this comic is a day late and that was simply because of work and an advanced deadline of the accountant due to the holidays. So, the comic was bumped one day, sorry!

I’ve always steered clear from playing 18xx games, hearing from Heinze and friends that it easily took five to six hours and people sat at the table using calculators and even spreadsheets to keep track of what was happening on the board. Nothing about that sounds very appealing to me so whenever they have an 18XX day planned, I just have a day to myself (which is not too shabby either ;-)) But the ’18xx’ group has been asking when I and a friend are joining them and finally play our first 18xx game and… we might have said yes. So, that’s happening this month! We’ll see if it’s the experience that I think/fear it will be… or maybe I’ll like it? I will let you know in a few weeks!

Even though last week was about a 60-hour work week, we did play some games! We started the week by playing another game of Maul Peak and we’re still very much charmed by the concept of the game! Playing as the bears (heroes) that have to defeat the guardian is a tricky thing to do as you have to accept you’ll be taking heavy losses on your way to climb the guardian before you can start doing damage and limiting the Guardian player’s actions. We still need to start playing it with one of the other guardians that come with the game and see if that makes it even harder for the heroes or just harder for the Guardian player due to the higher complexity rating.

We also got a surprise package from the Dutch publisher 999Games containing Sky Team and two games from their new solo puzzle series, the Flex Puzzler and Cat Stax (originally published by Huch & Friends). I’ll be honest that I think that the Flex Puzzler has a fun concept but it’s almost impossible to make puzzles complicated. I found little difference in difficulty between puzzles 40 and 80 (which is the last one) so that was slightly disappointing. I think I’ve spent about an hour solving all the 80 challenges. Cat Stax seems more of an actual puzzle because it’s about fitting pieces to a grid but I haven’t tried that one yet. We’re looking forward to trying Sky Team since we haven’t played it since we played the prototype back in 2022 in Essen!

We ended the week with our second game of Distilled and as we suspected: that was a way quicker game! There’s not too much player interaction with just two because you’re then both trying to achieve different goals and have little competition or a hard time getting the ingredients you’re looking for. Nonetheless, I like the game! It has a relaxing length and complexity.

Tonight it’s time for another game of Descent, one of the last scenarios! 😀

Pfew, it’s been a busy week with lots of cool things!

The biggest thing probably was Heinze’s going-away party at his old job, he and a friend/colleague came up with the fun idea of organizing a Klask! tournament. Since it was organized in the university’s TV studio, they added some dramatic lighting so the whole thing looked impressive. With Klask! being such a simple and accessible game, it was a perfect combination of excitement and fun.

It was also the week of my birthday and although I didn’t celebrate it with a party, our game night on Friday turned into a fun early birthday celebration night with cake and lighter (party) games. The biggest hit was one of the latest titles of Wise Wizard Games’  alternative label “Wacky Wizard Games”… Caution Signs! It’s a game in which players get 20 seconds to draw a combination of two words on a caution-sign-shaped board. The cards with these words are then shuffled face down in a pile with four random other cards and these are handed over to the ‘guesser’ of that round. They’ll then have to combine the right words with the drawings! Normally, there’s a slight hesitation with people when they have to draw things, but 20 seconds is too short for anybody to draw something good, and people like me, who draw a lot, maybe even have a harder time because you can’t draw something good-looking.

That night, we also played a game of Mantis, The Resistance, Flip Over Frogs, and Miss Match. We learned a few things that night, including that we think Flip Over Frogs is more fun with two players we found the rules of Miss Match a bit too loose leaving too much space for interpretation of whether an answer was correct or not. That and word association games are hard for some people (including me), so that game was a little bit of a mismatch (sorry) for us.

Earlier that week we also received a copy of Distilled, a game we heard a lot of buzz about so we were eager to try it out. At first, we found it tricky but after finishing our first game – we have to admit it’s not that complex and we could now easily introduce this to new players and the playtime of 30 minutes per player feels correct once you know the rules. The theme and the ‘feel’ of the game really reminded us of the game Chai, a game about making and selling tea only Distilled’s complexity is higher. Although we enjoy the tea theme better, Distilled better fits our level of gaming.

This week is going to be busy with finishing a big project on my side but hopefully, we’ll manage to squeeze in some board games. Fingers crossed!

It can be quite a bummer when you receive a heavily damaged package and its contents have also taken a blow… but there is also a big difference in people’s attitude towards what is considered a damaged product. One of our local game stores sells “damaged” game copies which often are discounted by 10-20%, we got our Sleeping Gods there with the tiniest of dents in the corner of the back of the box which we could hardly see, but according to the store owner that often is enough for customers to return a game.

There are arguments on both sides here. If you’d still like to sell the game in the future, even small damage will lower the resell value and it’s also understandable that you just want a product to be in perfect condition because you paid for it. But… the stories we’ve heard from people working at customer support are discouraging and have changed our view on this topic and we’re OK with receiving a damaged game box. We’ve also heard the complete opposite of people sending a message to customer support with a picture of completely ruined boxes (soaked even), just asking for a few replacing components.

“The contents are fine, just send me a new box!” is something we’ve heard many times. It’s not something you really think about but there’s not such a thing as “a new box”; they are shipped from the factory to a warehouse as a complete game. With margins being quite slim on physical products like board games, it’s an automatic financial loss for a store or publisher.

We once ordered a small box Mansions of Madness expansion at a certain big online store and it was sent in a cardboard envelope instead of a box. Clearly it had been crushed under something heavy in transport and it looked so bad we considered contacting customer support. But luckily we decided to first take a look at the contents and amazingly enough: they were fine! Not even the miniatures were damaged! Since we were going to store the contents in another MoM box we decided to not follow up on it and leave it be. Had the game been a gift for a friend that would have been a different story of course. This all being said, I’d say 95% of the games we receive have no damages at all and look pristine so luckily it’s still an exception. 🙂

Right, so what did we play last week? We played a competitive game of Aethermon Collect but we think we might like the co-op version of the game better because it presents a more interesting puzzle. We’ll play it co-op again next time to compare. We got a package containing Guilty: Houston 2015, an investigation game (and also our first 18+ title from Iello!) and Compile: Main1, a light competitive card game. We’ve only played it once so far and we’d say the gameplay is comparable to the concept of Air, Land & Sea only you get to construct your own “deck” just like in Gosu X or Smash Up. It was fun and quick enough that we’ll play it more often and we really enjoy that they’ll be releasing small expansion packs with three new ‘factions’ in it. To end the week we decided to play a game of The Guild of Merchant Explorers, which is nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres, congratulations!

And in case you missed it, we published an extra comic last week about the upcoming re-release of Witness, the whisper investigation game!