(if you don’t have Instagram, you can also watch our Weekly Recap videos on YouTube)

We did bring home many games but they didn’t have the volume that we expected! There are a lot of smaller game boxes nowadays and we’re enjoying this trend. There are more shorter, smaller games, there is a noticeable rise in two-player games after the success of Sky Team and there are, of course, a lot of trick-taking games that don’t need a big box.

So last week we started with our new games and played quite a few of them! We kicked the week off with Joyride Duel and it was just as quick-paced and silly as we had hoped it would be. We had an exciting race with hilarious moments in less than an hour. Highly recommended if you’re into racing games (with a chaotic element).

On Tuesday we took it a little easy and played a game of Pina Coladice, Festival, and Can’t Stop. The first is a combination of Yathzee and Four-in-a-Row and it works surprisingly well! It’s quick, easy, looks good and it’s perfect when you’re looking for something light and small to play while having a chat. It is important to keep an eye out on your opponent though, before you know it they will have ended the game. Festival also is a casual game but it has more bite to it. Each player has their own grid on which they place tokens. During the game, you’re trying to complete and score objectives but the interesting thing is that all the tiles you’ve placed, stay on your board meaning you can use them to complete other objectives. Combine that with a stacking element and you’ve got quite a nice little puzzle going on.
We also played our first game of Can’t Stop, well, at least a ‘psychical’ version of the game. Can’t Stop is Can’t Stop, it’s a silly push-your-luck game that can be enjoyed by many. We also really love the foldable edition that we got.

To continue with the smaller dice games, we also played King of Tokyo Duel last week. Iello has given this game a nice vintage look that we’ve also seen with the Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze box and we’re digging this esthetic! The game itself is a very short push-and-pull game. In our first game, we used the characters with the lowest complexity rating but that fell flat with us. Also, one of the two simpler characters just had a superior special power compared to the other one which felt unfair. In our second game, we went with the more complex characters but even those didn’t excite us very much. We feel like the power cards didn’t really add very much to the game because we both went into ‘racing mode’ (you win the game if the two tokens on the track are in a certain area on your side of the board -or- if one of the tokens hits the end of the track on your side). We’ll have to play it a few more times to see if there’s more to the game than we now think. It plays very quickly so that won’t really be a problem. 😀

Later that week a friend who had also been to SPIEL, joined us and he brought the game Yatai with him! A game from a smaller Italian game publisher that we had never heard of. In Yatai you’re trying to run the best Yatai (small food stall) and it really felt like a cozy game. The actions you take feel logical (having to recycle things and take out the trash), cooking food, and serving customers. The customers you’ve served are then placed in a grid on your board to unlock extra bonuses or get good reviews that’ll give you more points at the end of the game. We found the action-selection mechanism very interesting! It falls in the category cozy game with a little more spice to it since you are able to send unwanted customers to other players’ Yatai. We ended the night with a game of Typewriter, a quicker/smaller version of Paperback! Having played a lot of Paperback it took a little bit of time to get used to this mechanic and we also found it hard to score points. A game we’ll have to get better at. 🙂

This weekend, we sat down to play some more Dead Cells (the board game). We have never played the video game but we are familiar with the rogue-lite concept of games. We are intrigued if a board game can give us the same feeling a video game can so we played three runs in a row. Every run we managed to unlock new cards/items and we got further in the level. Even when we entered a new area and we thought we would be dead after the second encounter, we somehow made it to the end of the area and reached the end boss (again). We’ve made four runs in total and we’ve reached the end boss twice now. We have the feeling it will take us at least another two or three runs to defeat him but that’s ok. We’re mostly very curious if the game will take any turns after the first end boss or if it’ll be a continuing repeating loop with different areas and enemies. So far, it really did give us that “AGAIN!”-feeling and that’s impressive. Looking forward to exploring this one more.

In the evening, we gave one of the cases of Crime Unfolds, the murder mystery pop-up book a try. We’ve mostly played really hard escape room-like games and we went into this one way too hard. Puzzles were lighter and less complicated than we expected, which in hindsight is quite funny – we should have seen that coming with a playing time of roughly 60 minutes per case according to the game. We did find that the solution of this first case was far-fetched though but we’re hoping that this is an exception. We’ll see!

On Sunday, we played a game of Floresta. We love how Mebo Games always makes games that are based on Portugal and this one is no exception. It breathes life and the illustrations are wonderful. The board does become a little messy in the end when it’s all filled up with trees and fire tokens (but maybe that’s just us not being very good at putting out the fire. ;-)). The gameplay is quick. Both players play an action card and after that, you continue to the fire phase – you get to remove fire tokens if you have a truck and fire will spread. Then, newly drawn cards will decide if new fires will added to the board and players take their actions again, etc etc etc. With two players, it felt like the game took a little too long and we are wondering if the balance of taking actions versus the fire phase, is better with three/four players.

And that was it! This week we’ll be playing significantly fewer games because we have multiple non-board games things planned but we’ll share that next week.

This week’s comic is a little late due to a deadline followed by a lovely case of Con Crud… oh well, it happens!

We made a short video compilation every day! You can watch all of them on our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/semicoop 

When we were at Spiel we noticed every conversation someone asked “What did you play today” and while you’d think everybody plays games at Spiel, we realised loads of people (including us) don’t really play games at the convention. That might sound strange but just let us show you how busy our Spiel days have been:

Wednesday was Press Day. We arrived in the afternoon to check out the novelties show, where most new games are set up on tables for the press to check out without the masses of visitors. There were a lot of games missing though, but it was nice to get a preview and scribble down which games we’d like to check out the following days. In the evening, we went to a dinner organized by Jay (CardBoardEast) and Justin (MeepleMountain) at an Italian restaurant. We’re used to ordering a pizza per person but we hadn’t seen that this restaurant served pizzas with a 45cm diameter! Oh dear! It was a fun night and we had lots of fun talking to Beeneta, Tim Chuong, and Banzainator! On our way back to the hotel we enjoyed the light festival in Essen.

Thursday was the first official day of SPIEL! We bumped into some friends and we joined them in a demo of the game Atoll by Albi, it’s a fun sealife-themed engine-building game in which you’re building a coral reef. After that, we had a meeting at Hopeful Games to try out their upcoming game Neon Hope. This was probably our highlight of the fair. We’d say it’s an Arkham Horror the Card Game-styled storytelling game without the deckbuilding hassle set in a Netrunner-like world. We really enjoyed our demo and the way the gameplay worked. We’ll share our detailed experience/opinion when we play the entire demo case.
We also had an impromptu meeting with Debbie and Rob from Wize Wizard Games and they showed us their upcoming new card game Draconis 8 which had us intrigued because the game works with decks of only eight cards which you’ll be able to buy in tiny booster packs. We said hello to some friends, had dinner, and returned to the hotel where we played a game of Dead Cells (it actually feels rogue-like!) and I played Hot Pot Holic and 1 AM Jailbreak while Heinze played a game of Fishing.

Friday was one of those days at Spiel that flew by! We came in a little later and mostly said hello to publishers who showed us cool things. We had a lovely explanation of City of the Great Machine and Key Enigma showed us their latest cool project which is a pop-up book escape game! We really enjoyed their escape game Hack Forward so it was cool to hear them talk passionately about this new project and what other projects they have planned. We bought some awesome meeple socks at our friends of Rood met Witte Stippen! We knew that Rory (from Rory’s Story Cubes) was demoing at the Eldfall Chronicles booth so we went there and had a lovely talk about the game and why he thought this was so good and how he consulted on parts during the development. After a long day, we retired to the hotel and played a game of Seaside and Dirt and Glory. We were joined by more awesome people and we played another game of Dirt and Glory which is a very fun take on blackjack, although we think it takes a little long with five players.

Saturday! Originally the busiest day of Spiel but not this year, because every day was sold out and busy. We picked up a copy of Gibberers after it was highly recommended to us and this is one of the games we have a perfect gaming group for. It’s a game in which you develop your own language and that sounded right up our alley. We dropped by the meet-and-greet event to say hello to some people and walked into a lot of friends and… people who actually recognized us while we weren’t part of the meet-and-greet (thanks for saying hi though! :D). It mostly was a social day and we ended up playing some short games in the hotel in the evening. Ian showed an upcoming game he illustrated called Sausage Sizzle (it’s adorable!) and we played Potato Tomato which was complete chaos but also hilarious. We also tried to play Bottle Imp with six players but we wouldn’t recommend that…

On Sunday we first tried some releases for next year with a publisher, which wasn’t planned at all but happened because we all stuck around after breakfast. Then we headed to the hall for three meetings, first with Scorpion Masquee who showed us a very exciting new project for next year and we visited our friends at Deep Print Games, which hyped us up for their seven(!) releases in 2025. Lastly we had a nice talk at Czech games with Eleni about social media and marketing, which is always nice as we’re always intersting in how people social media to hear what we might have missed or could change. Then it was time to head home with stacks of games!

These are all the games we brought home! We were gifted most of these games, so we put a * behind those we purchased ourselves.
– A Fake Artist Goes to New York *
– Battalion
– Can’t Stop *
– Calling Card *
– Compile Expansion *
– Crime Unfolds
– Dead Cells
– Dirt and Glory
– Eldfall Chronicles starterpack
– Festival
– Flatiron *
– Floresta
– Gibberers: The Word Game of Language Invention and Civilization Development *
– Gloomhaven: Bugs and Buttons
– Gosu X expansions *
– Guilty: Monaco 1955
– King of Tokyo Duel
– Middle-Ages
– Moving Wilds expansion
– Neon Hope (demo)
– Pina Coladice
– Ratjack
– Rebel Princess
– Seaside
– Seers Catalog
– Seti
– Sky Team: Turbulence
– Sandbag
– Sausage Sizzle
– Typewriter
– Xylotar

We have played some of them but we’ll be busy trying them out the coming weeks and seeing which ones are winners in our opinions. If you see anything you love (or our curious about) let us know, we’re still not quite sure where to start… 🙂

We couldn’t help ourselves after seeing the new CGE logo and this comic had to get out of our system. 😉 I like the logo though, it’s playful and makes it a little less corporate and the Galaxy Trucker character is versatile and can easily adjusted if they’d like funny custom logos.

Speaking of CGE, they’re releasing SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Spiel next week and we’re looking forward to it. We love a good sci-fi/space game and this one ticks a lot of our boxes. We’re unfamiliar with the designer Tomáš Holek but liked what we saw of the prototype at UKGE earlier this year.

Let’s return to last week. Now that Descent is finished, we’ve ‘officially started’ our Middara campaign and kicked it off by creating our characters and a shopping session (we did the tutorial a few months ago). So, ok, technically, we’ve not really started yet but from now on we’ll be playing it once every two weeks… for as long as we like it! We’ve had a good track record with completing Gloomhaven and Descent, so we’ll see if Middara can live up to those two.

We also played our first team game of Undaunted Callisto, which was really different from a two-player game! I personally might prefer it with just two players, but maybe it’s too soon to say that after playing just one four-player game.

And we played another Osprey Games’ game! One that we’ve been really looking forward to and that’s War Story: Occupied France. I would describe the game as a tactical choose-your-own-adventure game. It was interesting that no one at the table felt any connection to the characters we were using for this first mission. They almost felt more like assets to us. We first wondered if that somehow lessened the experience, but it really didn’t. The story was exciting and immersive and there was a very interesting balance between skill checks, puzzle-solving, and tactical decisions. At the end of our first game, however, we did realize the value of our ‘assets’ and that our agents were in fact quite squishy, meaning losing any one of them makes our future missions more difficult (we did lose one…). We were all equally impressed and are looking forward to the second mission.

Another new game we played is Tower Up, a game by Monolith Games. It’s a short lighter city-building game that takes about 45 minutes. There’s more to this game than meets the eye and we’d like to try it with three or four players to see how that changes the puzzle. The tricky part of the game is that in your turn, you can either pick a resource card or you can start a new building on the board. Whenever you place a building and it’s adjacent to any other building, you have to ‘pay the costs’, which means you have to stack another block on top of the neighboring building in the same color as those buildings. After that, you can place a roof on one of the buildings you’ve just added a block to. Just one of them. We quickly realized that once a building is completely surrounded, you can never place a roof on that building again!

This week it’s time for Spiel. Four (and a half) crazy days of masses of people and more board games being released than we’ll ever play. It’s going to be interesting! We don’t have many games on our “MUST-SEE” list this year so we’re going to let ourselves be surprised and see what we come across in the halls.

In case you missed it, we published an extra comic last week about Deep Print Games’ Roaring 20s!

We’re not native English speakers and with word games, my head sometimes goes a bit wonky switching between multiple languages (English, Dutch, German, French) except for the one we’re playing. Reading, for example, a rulebook does help combat that a bit. 😀 Playing the real Paperback at the table does feel like it’s way harder than playing the app version because the app has a built-in spell checker, leaving some room for ‘experimentation’ if you’re not sure if a word is correct.
But… since this 10th Anniversary Edition of the game has a card illustrated by yours truly, I’d better get used to playing the analog version because I’m looking forward to showing off the card to our friends! It’s so weird to have something you made included in a game but also really cool so I’m grateful Tim Fowers offered me the chance!

So last week, we played Undaunted 2200: Callisto and I must say I really like this version of Undaunted. Our two games have been really close and fun. The game feels more dynamic and exciting than the other Undaunted games and I don’t really know how to explain why. The setup time has decreased greatly now that there is a board for every mission. I cannot say what that will mean for the replayability at this point but we thought the first two maps were already interesting enough to play again. In our case, we’ll probably play through the entire game with our current setup (Heinze as the miners, and me as the Corp) and if we’re still up for it, we can switch it around. It’s absolutely a step up for me compared to the original war theme, big fan. 🙂

Most of the week, Heinze was away for work and our weekend was booked with social activities so we didn’t get to play a lot of games. But we did receive a copy of War Story: Occupied France which is a choose-your-own-adventure-like game that takes place in WW2. Ever since we first heard about it, we’ve been intrigued and are looking forward to the game night we already planned for it with a friend who was also very hyped.

Another interesting new game in our collection is City of Six Moons. It’s a game ‘discovered’ by Amabel Holland and it’s a strange one, which is perfect for one of our gaming groups. It’s a game without text. Literally no text at all, so that also goes for the rulebook. You’ll have to try and figure out what the game is by deciphering the symbols and try to make sense of the rulebook. This sounded like such a weird thing that we ordered a copy and can’t wait to stare at the contents of this box with a group of people trying to see if they can also discover the game. The best/worst part is that there is no ‘right’ solution, so you’ll never know if you got it right.

This week is going to be a little light on games again, but if we have the energy this weekend… we might just play a load of games to compensate. 😀

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

Last year, we dragged along a deckbox filled with print-and-play games… but we never played them because our first hike in the mountains was more intense than anticipated. 😀 So this year, we decided to notch down the trail’s intensity a little and we went to the Mullerthal region in Luxembourg. We had planned to hike two of the three loops in four days, but due to a little injury at the end of day one on my side, we took it a bit easier the following days and we ended up walking route 2 and half of route 3. We were surprised to even come across a tiny board game store in Echternach called The Meeple Monastery! Those board gamers are just everywhere. 😉 If you’d like to see more of our hike in Mullerthal, I’ve also made this short hiking-only video with a bit more footage.

But as the comic suggests, we did play games besides hiking a lot! Our most-played game is Circle the Wagons because of how quick, simple, and fun it is. Another one of our favorites is Confusing Lands, which no longer is a PnP-game but now has a physical release! Skulls of Sedlec is also a charming fun game that we played a few times and we played one game of Liberation, which I do like the clever game design of but I was a little too low in energy to nail the memory part (mostly remembering which cards the other player has played) and that made it feel frustrating. Not the game’s fault, just not the right moment for it. If you’d like to learn more about the games, we’ve discussed them in these two earlier posts.

This week, we’re excited to play Undaunted 2200: Callisto and we received our Kickstarter deluxe edition of Paperback that contains a card I designed (aaaah!), also looking forward to playing that. 🙂

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! 🙂