Spiel ’17 has come and gone and it was great! We would like to thank all the readers that said hello and everybody who worked so hard to make Spiel such a success. And a special thank you to AbacusSpiele for sponsoring the games of NMBR9 we needed for a 70+ player game of NMBR9 during the meetup we organized together with JonGetsGames, Actualol and No Pun Included. The actual meetup went great and it was wonderful meeting board gamers and content creators from all over the world. Thank you all so much!

Right, that’s enough bold text for now. So, our first visit to Spiel was awesome. We went on Thursday and Saturday and that was quite enough for our first time ever. The size of the event and the crowds can be quite overwhelming! Although it’s nice that sitting down and playing a game allows you to filter out the masses of people a little, Besides meeting a lot of cool people (a lot more than pictured in this comic 😉 ), we’ve also demoed/played quite a lot of games, here’s a little list:

– Alien Artifacts
– Shadespire
– Hero Realms
– Giant Junk Art
– Muse
– Wordsy
– The Networks
– Burglar Brothers
– Fugitive
– Fog of Love

We didn’t buy too many games at Spiel and tried to get some titles that are hard to come by overhere. We’d like to support our local game store and will get the bigger titles another time this or next year. Also: we didn’t feel much for carrying around the heavy games all day. 😀

Punching out cardboard pieces of a new game… a fantastic activity. … Or is it? 😀

So it’s been an interesting week. I’ve been busy designing all sorts of things for Essen Spiel, making videos and thinking of awesome plans for Semi Co-op. After 2,5 years it’s time for a change, time for Semi Co-op to grow. Don’t worry, the comics won’t go away, we’re working on ideas to expand. So we’ve been playing with this idea of making videos, but we wanted ‘it’ to be Semi Co-op and not us sitting in front of a camera, so I’m working on animated versions of our cartoon characters!

Yesterday was an excellent opportunity to test run my unfinished puppets and to get a sneak preview of our future plans out in the open! We’re participating in a Star Realms tournament with other board game content creators and everybody loves to taunt each other through videos. We felt we needed to reply in a video as well and did so:

I don’t know yet when we will officially launch this new part of Semi Co-op – it might take a while, but the enthusiastic responses flatter and motivate me greatly. Thanks, everybody. 🙂

There are quite some advantages to sleeping on the couch. It’s the living room and all the good things are there – like a TV and maybe a gaming console. The only downside is… you probably have to work and function properly the following day, 😉

In case you missed it, we were interviewed by Fedja from Muffin Games! So if you’d like to know more about us, you can read it on his blog.

It’s been a busy week again and we’ve haven’t played that many board games. We’ve played some Kingdom Builder on the iPad in the train, a perfect way to spend your time. And we continued our Near and Far campaign yesterday and we’re getting at a point that the game seems to be getting harder. It’s a cool development that the choices that you make during an adventure seem to matter more than earlier in the game. We’re all still completely in love with this game and I think we’ll probably continue with the character campaign straight after the story campaign. 😉 We ended our gaming afternoon with playing Junk Art! It’s the perfect game when you just want to have fun, but you don’t want to sweat your brains too much.

And since this comic is also a little bit about video games, we got ourselves Rayman Legends and what a game! So much content … and the art is simply sublime.

A lot of game nights take place at our house and some bigger games are quite a hassle to take with you on a bike* and so they sometimes get left behind in at our place. 😀

* Yes bikes are really a big part of living in The Netherlands and a lot of people here don’t even own a car.

So we’ve been playing quite some games again this week and that has been fun again! With autumn kicking in, there is something cozy about huggling up at a kitchen table playing some board games with hot coco and a blanket.
It’s been a long while, but we played Forbidden Stars again! Too bad I had forgotten a lot of rules and made tons of silly strategical mistakes … ending the game in the fourth round. Normally our plays end in the final, the 8th, round.  It’s still a brilliant and elegant game and I will certainly have my revenge – soon. 😉

We also been playing multiple games of Elder Sign and we bought Kingdomino and that turns out to be a great filler game with a great flow.  The box says 20 minutes play time, but I think it can easily be played in 10 minutes with two players.

Last week we asked you guys for advice on deciding which games had to go and we received a lot useful tips – thank you! I’m curious:

We’re thinking about cleaning up our board game collection and giving away or selling some games we haven’t played for years and we know we’re probably never going to play again. I do find this a little difficult though. Games like Munchkin and Catan are true classics and Munchkin is probably one of the first games we ever bought, but we will we ever play them again? No, there are just so many better games. And yes, the Pandemic Legacy box. We actually still have it so that’ll definitely be the first one to go. 😉

Last week I played X-Wing for the first time! It feels like a lighter version of Tail Feathers. We played a team game and somehow our epic space battle took a little longer than usual according to those who play it more regularly. The dice were never really in favor of the attacking party, but they were helping out the defending party a lot. 😉 I’m curious how (quickly) the game plays one-on-one.