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I guess everybody has experienced this at least once in their life. Either in their own backyard, a park or while camping. Card games and the outside world are somewhat of a challenging combination. The idea is lovely, but the reality can be disappointing. 😉

We’re not actually on a vacation, but we did play a game with a lot of cards – within the wind free confinements of our own home. Yesterday we’ve played Food Chain Magnate for the first time! It is a little competitive, because players can really make the rest of the game harder for one another with one well-played marketing campaign. But since it’s not a direct attack on another player (like in a war game for example), but simply a well played action, we personally don’t mind. It fits in the setting of the game. I loved the details of the game, from the ‘menu card’ to the overall art style.  I can’t wait to play it again and try to sell pizzas to people for more than 30 dollar a piece!

What’s your best vacation board game memory? 😉

(This comic is part of our Summer Special which started last week)

I learned of the existence of Two Rooms and a Boom through Shut Up & Sit Down. It seems like a lot of fun if you’re with a large group. We’re hardly every in a situation with that many people, so it will be a rare thing if we ever do. But who knows, it’s surely on our to-play list!

We played Betrayal at the House on the Hill for the first time last week and that game is tons of fun! It turned out there wasn’t a traitor in our midst, but it ended in a free for all race/battle. There were two object in the house and the players who got to them first and  managed to escape the house won the game. All the other players lost.  My armored and loaded-with-weapons and well-read character managed to get away, hah! I might have mercilessly slain another player to achieve that though…

What other games are kind of inappropriate to play in certain situations or places?

This is the start of our Summer special! No, don’t worry, we’re not taking a summer break and upload less comics for you to enjoy. Comics will be ‘vacation’ themed the coming weeks. We have some nice ideas for our characters while they are abroad.

We ourselves have been quite busy lately with playing a lot of boardgames actually. This weekend we played Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective on Saturday. We solved case six, The Mummy’s Curse and scored 65 points. We could have scored a lot higher but we we’re looking for (and expecting) a more difficult (and creative) solution so we visited a lot of places, but it wasn’t there alas! It was not the best case in our opinion. Yesterday we played a 6-player game of A Game of Thrones. It was intense and it took us about 5 hours, but it’s a great game. Tomorrow we’ll be playing Mysterium (with the new expansion Hidden Signs!) and Wednesday we finally get to play Betrayal at the House on the Hill. Looking forward to both of them.

Tonight there are no plans for playing games and to be very honest: I’m totally fine with that. 😉

What is that one game that’s perfect for taking along on a vacation?

The Sheriff of Nottingham is one of those games on our to-play list. I did watch the Tabletop episode and didn’t want to wait for us playing it before making a comic about it. 😉

Yesterday we participated in a Netrunner tournament in our FLGS! We did some games for practice on Saturday, which were quite neccesary in my case… I hadn’t played Netrunner since the last tournament I participated in, which was in September last year. Whoops, time flies. Nonetheless I ended in fourth place on Sunday – and had fun with my Chaos Theory and (Heinze’s old) Titan Transnational deck! 😀

And we won some pretty cool unofficial promo cards as well. 🙂 

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What have you been playing this weekend?

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Heinze played Mage Knight last week! Alas, I couldn’t join him, but I’ve heard a lot about it afterwards. The thing that struck him the most, was that the six rounds of the game, are three days and three nights. Meaning that your character gets really powerful and manages to gain a following to conquer cities with in just three days. It took them, three players, seven hours to finish the game.

Like mentioned in last week’s comic: it was my birthday last week, I had a great time and I got a tons of gifts from all my awesome friends. Including (of course 😉 ) board games. And expansions, which a lot of the readers mentioned as a good idea for a gift! We can’t wait to try these games/expansions!

What do you think of Mage Knight?

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So this actually is becoming an issue! We already own a lot of games and the group of friends around us that play (and own) board games is expanding. Luxury problems! And this Wednesday is my birthday and I really don’t know what to ask. There’s still some games in our house that we still need to play, so I’m hestitant to ask for even more games. I’ll just let people surprise me, haha. 😀

Diplomacy?!
Diplomacy is (as far as I heard) quite a way to damage friendships. I myself haven’t played it, but Heinze did. What I know is that the game takes a very very long time to play. And you most certainly know that a nice friend you negotiated an alliance with, will break that alliance as soons as he/she got what he/she wanted out of that deal. I’ve heard other people still talk about betrayal in a Diplomacy game that took place years ago. It’s fascinating, but to be very honest: not something I would play.

What game should I definitely ask for my birthday?

(If you’re curious: click here for a list of all the games we already own)

Apologies! The update is a little later than usual today, we were in Paris last week for the European Street Challenge ’16 and I still had to color this week’s comic.

We had very little free time, but in the few hours we had to ourselves we did actually pass by a gaming store in Paris! But it seemed that most games were in French, alas. 😉 It’s a small habit of ours to visit “FLGS” in areas unknown to us. It’s fun to see and compare the difference in stock of stores (in different countries). And mostly, we are reminded how lucky we are with our own game/comic book store here in our city.

About the comic!
It’s about Mysterium and I love that game! Sometimes conversations can go sideways when you’re having a good time, things remind us of other things and ‘bla bla bla’ happens, followed by ‘Eh, right, what were we talking about?’. It’s easy to see that happening in Mysterium with the completely random (but beautiful) vision cards. Luckily there’s an hourglass to prevent that from happening, a little.

You often see in Mysterium that players will try to adjust their interpretation of images to what they think the other player thinks. UpTo4Players has a brilliant comic about that, only with Code Names.

So, ehhm, what’s your favorite guacamole recipe? 😉

Dice hammer, what?! Yes! DICE HAMMER. I saw this beauty on Reddit many moons ago and ever since I started Semi Co-op I wanted to make a webcomic about a dice hammer situation (gone wrong)! 😉 It’s such a ridiculous and magnificent object, at the same time.

The last time we played Dungeons and Dragons has been quite a while ago as well. It must have been about six or seven years ago. We weren’t much of a serious roleplaying group and mostly enjoyed hanging around together as a group. I’m sure that our Dungeon Master was presented with quite some silly requests from our characters. “There’s a rooster behind that fence?! Can we take it with us?!” When we decided we could better end our adventures in the world of Dungeons and Dragons because we were distracted by everything our party came across, our DM wrote a horrifying last mission for us in which we all died. My character got her brains sucked out and somebody else his character turned into a tree, forever. Technically he didn’t die, I guess. But: good times!

What’s your most memorable moment in a role playing game?

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So we finally played Chaos in the Old World! One of our friends had been raving about it and tried to get it on the table for months, but somehow it never happened. So we finally sat down to play this dark and gritty board game. The theme belongs to probably one of the darker games we’ve played so far. I first thought that the map on the board was made of leather. I was quickly corrected – it turns out that it’s supposed to be human skin. Geez! This comic takes a closer look at what players are actually doing to the Old World (and its inhabitants). 😉

If you look through this thick greasy layer of evil darkness you’ll be suprised to find a really good and fun game to play. I was amazed at how easy it was to learn and how elegant the game mechanics were. And… it even though it’s a real Fantasy Flight Games game: it didn’t take us 6 hours! We’ll definitely play this again.

What is the darkest themed game you own or played?

Since the success of Pandemic Legacy there has been a noticeable increase of games with a (story) campaign. What , campaign games?  Yes, those are games that have a story line which players can complete in a certain amount of play sessions. Of course there were other campaign games before Pandemic Legacy, like Risk Legacy or Mice and Mystics, but the popularity of campaign games have sky rocketed since Pandemic Legacy spread its virus over the globe.

This has already changed the way we’re playing games, a little. We like to play it at least once a week if possible. So at the moment the only campaign game we’re playing is Imperial Assault and we’d like to keep it at one campaign game at the time to prevent the comic above becoming a reality. 😉

Speaking of campaign games: Near and Far! We’re psyched about the fact that this was announced and will be a Kickstarter project in the (hopefully, near) future. We simply love Above and Below and can’t wait for an even more story driven game that takes place in that same beautifully illustrated world. And a little bird told us that the extra encounter book that was only available through the Above and Below kickstarter will be available as a stretch goal. Dubble win! I do hope the little bird wasn’t lying.

Are you currently playing a game with a story campaign (or maybe even more than one)? Which one(s)?
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