Sometimes you see an initiative you want to support, so you try to write a comic about it and end up with a joke not mentioning the actual thing…

So we would like to offer a formal apology to the Green Games Guide! We really enjoyed reading the guide and the inclusion of practical examples of publishers taking steps helped us as consumers see what to keep an eye out for when trying to be a little more environmentally conscious during our cardboard and plastic-filled playtimes. Just making board games more environmentally friendly won’t save the planet but we’re convinced we all have to critically examine everything in our life and make some drastic changes, to keep our planet habitable.

We’ll never say we’re the most conscious environmental gamers but we have been turned off by several games in the past that looked interesting but seemed very wasteful in its product design. Give us a game filled with well-designed standees or meeples and we’ll get way more excited about it than offering us heaps of plastic that will only appear on the table once or twice. We’ve also cut down on buying new games, although that’s also because we are in the very rare and fortunate position that publishers send us games.

This week, life decided to throw us quite a bit of curve balls our way, so we only played three games, which all happen to be older classics. Firstly, we revisited Seasons, It’s still a wonderful dueling wizards card game that was already featured in our fifth-ever comic. Rachel scored over three hundred points, leaving me in the dust which I can blame completely on me discarding the wrong card and Rachel using that card to create a super powerful card drawing engine… So I guess we’ll just have to play a revenge game soon.

Another oldie we played was Flash Point: Fire Rescue, which was featured in our third-ever comic! We played the submarine map, which is always very tricky. Even though we won on easy mode, it was a lot closer than we’d like to admit. We got very lucky because most of the POI we lost to the fire turned out to be empty tokens and we saved the engine room just in time to pull through.

Last, but certainly not least, we played Take 5/6Nimmt which is probably a high point in game design that most game designers can only dream to reach one day. It’s just a joyous frustrating experience and if you haven’t played it go find a copy or try it on BoardGameArena.

This week we’ll be returning to our Artisans of Splendent Vale campaign, which has been an enjoyable experience although we both agree it’s not the best game ever. While it tries to recreate a roleplaying game experience, the characters haven’t connected with everyone, making it a bit strange to ‘roleplay’ characters you don’t have a feel for. It also doesn’t help our group can only play every other month, which makes us doubt if we have the rules correct every time. But the production is beautiful, the setting interesting and it has some very clever design tricks up its sleeves to make the choose-your-own-adventure parts interactive and interesting for a group. So we’ll happily keep exploring the contents of this enormous box.

We’ll also be playing New Angeles! I got to play it once using Tabletop Simulator once during Covid and loved it so much that I ordered a copy the next day. This game is a brutal semi co-op negotiation game set in the Netrunner universe and I can’t wait to see if it’s just as good in real life. We have ‘power suits and ties’ as dress codes to make it more immersive and we’ll also be serving a business lunch, although we still have to figure out what that actually means…

Player color preferences, I have them! Honestly, mine is mainly born out of necessity because I am colorblind, and yellow happens to be the easiest to recognize for me in the low light conditions in which a dining table primarily resides. This does cause some “trouble” with some friends who also prefer to play yellow but except for several occasions in which people accidentally move another player’s pieces, it hasn’t led to any conflicts… yet.

Speaking of player conflict we played a lot of new games this week, with several being quite good at making you hate the other players at the table. On Tuesday, we played Shamans, which is a hidden role trick-taking game that surprised us in many ways. We had briefly spotted Shamans at Spiel 2021 but Studio H had several other titles, like Oltréé and Suspects, which we decided looked more interesting at the time. While reading Dan Thurot‘s great article on trick-taking games in Senet #10 (which also happens to include an article by us!) we noticed he spoke quite highly of Shamans, so we decided it was time to take a look. The presentation of Shamans is lovely and mysterious but once you know how it works, it becomes easy to understand and it’s a lot of fun. If you can imagine playing the Crew while having that gleefully tense experience of a game of Werewolves, you know exactly how this is going to play out. People will be shouting they don’t have the right suit to follow, or people are suddenly raking in all sorts of tokens in secret, which might be used against you or maybe just be collected in hopes of getting some extra VPs at the end of the round. It’s great and we’re going to be introducing this to loads more people.

We also, after years of it being praised by Shut Up & Sitdown, played Skull and it instantly clicked with the group and we all loved it. It’s a bluffing game about trying to flip beer coasters, hoping you don’t flip one with a skull. The game looks lovely and the rules are super simple plus the highs and lows at the table are present every time someone starts the bidding to see how many coasters should be flipped. We highly recommend trying this game or getting some beer mats/coasters to make your own copy.

On Saturday a friend and I tried Age of Fantasy: Skrimish, which is a free skirmish miniature game by One Page Rules. One Page Rules has a number of free games that allow you to bring some miniatures to the tables for some quick and simple Warhammeresque battles on your favorite tabletop. We had a good time, and the miniatures and the table looked great, it isn’t the deepest game ever, so as a board gamer that likes tough decisions, you should probably look for something meatier. But if you’re just looking to introduce yourself or some friends to miniature-wargaming, or want something quick while having the mental capacity to talk about and enjoy some snacks, this would fit the bill. The game does offer mission cards and even a campaign mode which would add some more interesting choices in the process, so maybe we’ll try some of those options the next time we want to move some minis across a table.

This week we haven’t planned any games yet but our new store is keeping us busy as well as an upcoming exciting reveal in a rerelease of a game currently on Kickstarter! 😎 And in case you missed it, we published a commissioned comic last Thursday about the new Santorini co-op expansion!

Setting a date for a game day/night, we’re bad at it! We have several communications going on at all times trying to figure out when to play cool games with cool people. Once a date is proposed though it’s nice to have a quick check with our calendars together, which is something that we forget to actually do than we would like to confess. So this comic is a big sorry to all those friends who are still waiting for us to respond when we should play New Angeles/Galactic Renaissance/three-player Undaunted, Pandemic Legacy Season 0, and Vast: Mysterious Manor!

This week we were successful in planning some game nights though! We played a rare weekday game of Crisis, our first game of Fall of Magic and six games of Mists Over Carcassone. Crisis is still a wonderful economic worker placement game that can be quite brutal. I’m pretty sure I’ve come in last in all the games of Crisis I played but that is because I somehow always end up with a bread/resort strategy which ends up being too narrow to keep up with scoring in the end. Looking at our scores, we think we’re ready to scale up to hard mode the next time as well, so we got a great reason to play it again soon.

We were a bit nervous about Fall of Magic because we aren’t that great at storytelling games but we had a great time. It’s fascinating that games like this are driven by improvisation and discussing with your fellow players what you want the game to be like instead of its rules. Because the game makes you put your character at a location, it became mostly a story about what our fellowship did in the off-time in our journey. The resulting story was a lot more introspective that your standard fantasy roleplaying game. This gave us a lot of room to explore our own characters and ask questions about the world we are shaping. My character ended up becoming a sort of strange traveling scholar troubadour while Rachel played an 8 feet sandstone golem with a sculpted raven on their shoulder. Our other players played a talking fox and a midwife which was part of a powerful midwife cult that might end up becoming an adversary later on. Now that we have a direction and some fleshed-out characters, we all agreed the next time we wanted to have a bit more interaction among the different characters so we can really form a team to help the Magus get to the end of their journey.

This Saturday, we played six games of Mists over Carcassone, which is a stand-alone co-op version of Carcassonne. It’s super easy if you already know Carcassonne and it’s a really nice family-level game to introduce people to show how much fun co-op games can be.

This week we’re returning to Mice & Mystics and this Saturday I’m playing my third game of War Room, the last games were a blast but we didn’t get to finish our previous two games. This time we made teams in advance and we’re discussing our opening turns and general strategy over Whatsapp, using the TTS mod. So maybe I can tell you next week how we got to finish our game!

Our people! The history of “meeple” has several more interesting parts but we’ll save those for future comics. The reason we had meeples on our minds, was because a friend has bought the Carcassonne big box plus the new co-op Mists over Carcassonne. Since we never actually played any of the Carcasonne expansions we’ll have a big Carcasonne game night soon and we’re curious how we like the different expansions and variants.

Speaking of planned board games, are we the only ones who have come out of the holidays with a very full board game agenda? In the coming weeks,  we’ll be playing loads of games from our bucket list or we’ll be revisiting old favorites that are hard to get to the table. This Friday we’re playing Artisans of Splendent Vale, this weekend we’re playing Alchemists with the expansion, the week after that we’re playing Gaslands, and we have a big game of Xia coming up and we’re finally trying Millennium Blades! We’re also playing with a nice mix of friends and new people, so it’s safe to say we’re starting of our gaming year very strong. 🙂

This week was also an interesting gaming week in which we played Flamecraft, Mechs vs Minions, Galileo Project, and even two games of the Pokemon Trading card game. Because our last time playing Flamecraft felt a little bland mechanics-wise, we opted to use all the advanced bells and whistles this time which improved the game a bit. It’s still not a game we would recommend for its deep choices but if you are looking for a nice cozy experience with a fun (co-op) engine-building twist, it works well. We would suggest going for the basic version of the game and don’t upgrade it to all the fancy bits before you know that you really like the game.

Galileo project is the third “mega corp colonizing space” game we’ve played this last week, together with Skymines and Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition. This one is a lot quicker and the whole game feels like a sprint from the beginning to the end. I really enjoyed the quick combo-building race but Rachel wished the game took a little more time to appreciate your engine of resource-generating robots and human-granting victory conditions. The game looks amazing right down to the back of the boards and the inserts and since it’s so quick, I’m sure it will hit our table again soon.

Mech vs Minions and the Pokemon card game are classics and we still enjoy both, although we might need some stronger opponents than our nephews for the latter to really appreciate the game. 😉

Happy new year everybody! We’ve had a nice and slow week between Christmas and New Year’s eve and we played a lot of new games, mostly just with the two of us. It’s been a really nice week and luckily we’ve got space to take it a little slow this week as well, which we think is well-deserved after we realized we made 85 different comics last year! We’ve already got some extra comics in the pipeline for this year as well, so we might even top that number this year although we don’t want to make it one of our new year’s resolutions. We do have some gaming-related resolutions though, we’re about to get Nikki Valens’ Artisans of Splendent Vale, for which we really hope to find two more players to get the full experience. I also personally want to paint up a Turnip 28 army in such a way I can use it for several other miniature war games because there are a lot of cool indie miniature games being released and it would be nice to have some units I can use to try different games.

But enough of what we want to do let´s talk about what we´ve played last week. We have had a blast with some games we feel might be slipping under the radar a bit. The heaviest is Skymines which is a reskin of Mombasa. In this game, you play investors investing in megacorps that are mining on the moon for helium-3. We really enjoy this game but it is a pretty lengthy affair and can be quite brutal in its programming mechanism if you make the wrong move at the start of a round. If that doesn’t scare you and you like a sci-fi capitalism theme, this is well worth your time but make sure you take an entire afternoon, or more, for your first game.

Secondly, we played two games of Mille Fiori. When we first saw the board we were a bit intimidated by the many space and tracks on the board but it turn out it is a nice and easy Roll-and-Write-Esque drafting game about glass blowing in Venice. Imagine if Ganz Schön Clever was a board game with some options to mess with other players but still had massive combo potential, that’s what Mille Fiori feels like playing. Speaking of board games that clearly have been inspired by Roll-and-Writes, we also played our second game of Guild of Merchant Explorers which is fun and comes with a number of different maps but it hasn’t left as much of an impression as Mille Fiori so far. We have a more casual gaming friend coming over tonight and we’re eager to try this type of game with him to see if this game can compete with Ticket to Ride or Takenoko for example.

Something that left a positive impression was the first scenario from Destinies’ Myth & Folklore expansion, which wasn’t as strict on a timer as the scenarios of the base game plus it had a more Fey-inspired Fairy Tale storyline. This really helped us see what other directions the game can take and we’re eager to try more scenarios to see if they stretch the game’s setting even more.

Lastly, we played Gosu X and Cryptid: Urban Legends which are both really good if you want a head-to-head game in which smart moves can really end a game quickly. Both are a bit hard to learn from the rules though so if you can find someone or a video that shows how it’s played, that can really help you see how all the different parts go together and get you playing these wonderful games.

As mentioned before, this week we’re taking a bit more time to relax so hopefully, it will give us some time to get the last of our Spiel haul off the shelf and play them. So far we haven’t encountered any real duds, so it seems 2022 was a good year for games!

We’d like to wish you happy holidays, or at least some days you’re able to relax and enjoy other people, some good movies, or of course some games!

We have some wonderful things lined up for 2023, so we hope you’ve enjoyed our comics enough to stick around for next year. Because it would be a shame if you would miss it. 😉

(ICYMI: We published another #SheGames comic on our site last week!)

Deduction games! We haven’t played them in a while but after our game of Deal with the Devil last week, we remembered how thrilling they can be. The tension at the table of not trying to give away who you are is a completely different mood when compared to a normal game. It also seems a genre that everybody has gotten at least one great story out of, which they will tell every time when someone brings up a social deduction game. 😉

After thinking about social deduction games for a while, this terrible joke popped into our head and we’re (not) sorry about it!

This week we only got to play three games but they were big ones! First up we played Tapestry and after four games we do like it but it seems there are parts of the game that could’ve been cut while at the same time you’re too dependent on the Tapestry cards you draw. It is a shame because we like the concept of the game and the different civilizations break the game in all manner of interesting ways so maybe we just have to put in a house rule of receiving two or three Tapestry cards at the start of the game so you can plan everything a bit more.

Secondly, we played our first game of Tiletum. Heavier euro games are pretty hit-and-miss for us, so we were dreading getting Tiletum to the table a bit but it’s really fun! While thematically it seems to make no sense: you play a rich man that employs a merchant, who just wants to build houses and visit fairs, and an architect, that just travels around to design parts of different cathedrals? Luckily, the different ways of scoring tie together in a fun way and offer you many ways to set up big combos which is always a big plus for us in these types of games. The game is also very variable in its setup so hopefully, that prevents a specific strategy from being an automatic win but we will have to figure that out in future plays.

Lastly, I played my second game of War Room, Rachel isn’t interested in playing a ten-hour World War 2 game but I really enjoy just spending a whole day discussing strategy and seeing the conflict on the very impressive board shift over the course of the day. Even though we played for ten hours, we didn’t get to finish the game, so we’re planning a rematch in April with some stricter time limits, hoping we might be able to finish our first game the next time!