Posts authored by Rachel

Nailed it

Nailed it published on 19 Comments on Nailed it

Today I’d like to talk a little about box inserts. Some games come with amazing box inserts, and some are basically … just a box. Besides pretty much all the games of Fantasy Flight Games, Agricola also is a perfect example of a game with the complete absence of an insert. I really applaud games like Seasons, Mysterium and Pandemic in the Lab for their box inserts, they’re very practical and look amazing.

We’ve been buying little boxes for some games and I came to the discovery that boxes holding nails, hooks and screws are sometimes ideal for keeping game tokens organised. The boxes are small and have a lot of compartments. As  a result we now have enough nails and hooks to hang everything. For the rest of our lives, probably. I prefer the already empty hobby organiser boxes of course, but with Elder Sign I just spotted this perfect tiny box for all the tokens.

The time it takes to set up a game is reduced nowadays! But most importantly: no more fiddly bags! 😉

You can also buy beautiful and perfectly pre-made inserts for your games. If you’re curious, check out the stores listed below (or check out this list of sellers):
The Broken Token
Daedalus Productions. Inc
Top Shelf Gamer

If you know any other great solutions or stores where you can get inserts: please share in the comments! 🙂

Which game has the best box insert and which game has the worst, according to you?

Bless you!

Bless you! published on 3 Comments on Bless you!

Note: This post contains no spoilers! 

Although we already did a comic about the concept of ‘Legacy’ games two weeks ago, this was one of those ideas that just needed to be published. 😉 At first I wanted to be further along in the game before making a comic about Pandemic Legacy, but since the comic shouldn’t contain any spoilers there was no reason to wait.

We’ve only just started playing Pandemic Legacy, but I can already tell that the game is very exiting. There is something very unusual and thrilling about playing a board game of which the rules / situation of the game might change suddenly at any point. In the beginning you try to put stickers on the game with great precision. You feel like a rebel the first time you rip up a card because the game tells you to. You try to write at your prettiest the first time you have to write on cards or on the  board… but you will probably fail at that because most pens don’t write very smoothly on the surface of the cards.

We both greatly recommend this game to everybody who likes Pandemic!

Warning to anybody who is playing the Dutch version of Pandemic Legacy:
There’s a translation error on the ‘Flexible’ upgrade sticker you can put on a character sheet. Translated to English it basically says: “For an action you may discard a card and pick one of your choice from the discard pile.” instead of “For an action, discard a card to draw a card of the same color from the player discard pile”. Click here for picture.

We already thought that this upgrade was very powerful and noticed that its translation was faulty when seeing the spoiler-free review of Shut Up & Sit Down. We’re hoping there aren’t any other translation errors that might throw off the balance of the game!

Don’t forget to be awesome

Don’t forget to be awesome published on 2 Comments on Don’t forget to be awesome

Hank Green, whom you might know from the VlogBrothers Youtube channel (which he runs with his brother John) has launched a kickstarter project for a card game: Wizard School! It seems like an interesting co-op game with a popular and fun theme. A gameplay video can be found here. There are still three days left to back the project, so you can still reserve yourself a copy of the game if you’re interested!

A little explanation about the comic: Hank and John Green also run a podcast together, Dear Hank & John, in which they answer questions, give advice and tell each other facts about either AFC Wimbledon or the planet Mars, so we’ve been fascinated about the idea of combining those two things in a game.

There are so many kickstarters nowadays! It’s fascinating to see how quickly the tabletop industry is growing. Although I love digital games, I very much enjoy the interaction with other people while playing ‘analog’ games, so I for one welcome this rise of tabletop games. The little free space left in our house, unfortunately, doesn’t. 😉

What do you think is the most interesting tabletop kickstarter project at the moment?

The anatomy of a turn in Epic

The anatomy of a turn in Epic published on 4 Comments on The anatomy of a turn in Epic

A couple of weeks ago we’ve received our Kickstarter copy of Epic, the card game by White Wizard Games, the creators of Star Realms. And we both think the game is a lot of fun! Basically all the cards give you this ‘Whut?! Wow…’ feeling the first time you see them. They are, as promised, EPIC! Alas, we humans don’t stay impressed too long by awesomeness and get used to things quickly. So nowadays it almost feels normal to summon something like a gigantic dragon, dinosaur, demon or even King Kong and let them fight an army of zombies. Or to just have the entire battlefield be swiped clean by an apocolypse. 😉

Beside its epic contents, the game is also smart. And I like that there are many ways to play it. You can shuffle up all the cards and take 30 random ones and play those as your deck. You can do a drafting session with the other player(s) with thirty random cards per player or you can just play one of the four factions. It just doesn’t matter, the game works fine either way! Our preference slightly leans toward drafting our own decks, but when time is limited – thirty random cards work fine as well.

We’ve played Epic with a third player once now and that totally changes the game, it takes a lot longer and the game requires a lot more brainpower than with two players. And this is not a bad thing, I was suprised by the difference. It’s just yet another side of Epic that seems to work very well.

What’s your favorite drafting game?

Tic Tac Toe Legacy

Tic Tac Toe Legacy published on 10 Comments on Tic Tac Toe Legacy

Last week was the worldwide release of Pandemic Legacy! And there’ s quite a hype for it in the board gaming world. Pandemic was (again) number 1 in the People’s Choice Top 100 of Dice Tower this year. The previous Legacy game, Risk Legacy, was received very well. I’m personally not a big fan of Risk and I didn’t want to dedicate to that many play sessions of Risk, so we skipped that one. I can’t wait to try the concept of Legacy with a game like Pandemic.

The idea of  the Legacy series is that  a ‘storyline’ is added to an excisting game. Unlike the original games, the Legacy games have an ending. After each play something changes and what this is is, depends on the outcome of the played game. You might have to draw things on the board, put stickers on it or add additional cards to the game.

Heinze and I are both quite exited about the game, although we’re not yet sure how we’ re going to organise it. We’d like to play it with a group of friends, but since you need to play the game at least 12 times (I’m not sure, probably more), it will be quite a hassle to organise it with a group without it taking us more than a year to finish it. Or maybe we might just have to play it with the two of us, but we enjoy playing the game with a group a little more.

Of what game would you love to see a Legacy edition?

The Weird West

The Weird West published on 13 Comments on The Weird West

At our FLGS (friendly local gaming store) we met somebody who is a big fan of Doomtown and has very balanced decks of all the Doomtown outfits (factions). He invited to us to come play Doomtown one day and so we did. I’ll be honest: the first time it reminded me of trying to understand all the different terms in Netrunner. Only instead of runs, stimhacks, ice breakers and agendas I had to get a grip on dudes, posses, deeds, upkeep, booting, shootouts and many more terms. But what a game! We played the game with four players and it was a lot of fun. I love the poker element in the game, it just makes it completely different than other games and it’s smoothly integrated into the game play.

Since we don’t own Doomtown ourselves and we’re pretty deeply invested in Netrunner, this is a game we like to play at a more casual basis. To be exact: we’ve played it only two times now, but I’m already looking forward to grabbing a my leather boots, long coat and cowboy hat to go out and play Doomtown again.  Yeeehaa!

And for the folks in the USA: the base game is less than $20 on Amazon, lucky you!

What collectable living trading card game do you play at a more casual basis?

Om nom nom.

Om nom nom. published on 11 Comments on Om nom nom.

Introducing Mariecke and Willem in the comic! You might see them more often in the future.

As the comic already implies: we like to dress up the game days we organise a little. We don’t see all of our friends as often as we used to, so we like to make it a little more special when we do. The last time we had a High Tea while playing Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, and that was excellent. And apparently it also makes us better detectives! We scored 75 points and answered all the questions correctly in the fifth case.

A photo posted by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on

What themed food + games day should we plan next? 😉

Sweet Dreams?

Sweet Dreams? published on 4 Comments on Sweet Dreams?

I really like Urbion and I’m quite disappionted that the game is no longer available. I believe we picked up the last copy at our friendly local gaming store a few years ago and since then, I wanted to gift it to at least four people – but alas: it was nowhere to be found!

Urbion is a nice little card game in which you have to establish balance in city districts by making sure that there are as many positive dreams as negative dreams next to a so-called City card. There are also Chaos cards in the game which will try to throw of the balance, to give you a little challenge. It’s a simple game, but it’s one of those tiny (solo) games I grab while I have to wait a bit during cooking. And although the artwork of the game probably doesn’t work for everybody, I love it! It’s different. It’s colorful and it nothing like other games (except the other games from the Oniverse series of course). And I had a lot of fun making this ‘comic’ in the style of Urbion. 😉

If you’re interested, there are are two games that are set in the Oniverse that are available:
– Onirim, gameplay wise, this game is closest to Urbion.
– Sylvion, which is a tower defense like game.

What games do you know with a very ‘alternative’ artstyle? 

Dead of Wi-… Trust

Dead of Wi-… Trust published on 5 Comments on Dead of Wi-… Trust

Ahhh… Dead of Winter. This game has been the cause of quite some distrust at the kitchen table. Dead of Winter is the pure definition of semi co-op gameplay. I love it.

What I think is genius about the game is that, besides a possible traitor, every player has his/her own personal secret objective in the game. Even if the group survives and finishes the main objective of the game, the player that didn’t meet their personal objective still loses the game. These personal objectives can be quite tricky to achieve without looking like a traitor. They vary from things like hording important goods like food and medicine to having a large following of survivors. These personal objectives make it possible for the actual traitor in the group to go about their treacherous behaviour without being noticed immediately.

The last time we played the game I was the actual traitor and prevented the group of winning the game in the last round. I was called a dirty traitor and other less kind things. So if you’re okay with possibly upsetting your friends and distrusting each other, you should definitely give the game a go. 😀

Do you know any other cool semi co-op games?

What about Wiggins?

What about Wiggins? published on 3 Comments on What about Wiggins?

A photo posted by Semi Co-op (@semicoop) on

The latest addition to our game collection is Mr Jack Pocket. Basically a very smart two player cat and mouse game in which Jack the Ripper tries to stay out of sight of Sherlock and his team or tries to outsmart them while being seen. It’s a quick portable game that takes about 15 minutes and worth checking out if you’ve never heard of it and are looking for a smaller game with a smaller price tag for two players.

Now, about that team of Sherlock… my first reaction was: What about Wiggins?! We’ve played a few cases of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and in that game the team clearly exists of Sherlock, Watson and Wiggins!

I tried to draw the comic a little in the style of the artwork of the game, but I somehow ended up channeling the art style of Tiny Wooden Pieces a bit as well. Check out their great comics about board games if you haven’t already. 🙂

What’s your favorite Sherlock Holmes themed game?
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