UK Games Expo time! The last time we went was in 2019 which means it’s been five years?! Anyway, we’re happy we’re going to be roaming the NEC halls in a couple of days and hopefully bumping into loads of friends. Feel free to say hi if you see us and we’ll make sure you get some stickers.

For those curious about what Rachel has on her list, here are some of the highlights:

We have a number of meetings to see and try new games. We’re very excited to have a meeting with CGE to see Seti and we’ll be playing some Flames of Fafnir at Lucky Duck Games. We played an early prototype at Spiel (we have some fun videos and photos of it we should post) so we’re curious how it evolved since last October.

Bez has some new games and considering Wibbell and Yogi are both great, we’re very curious what she’s cooked up this time. The best titles of her new games, in our opinion, is A game about Mini Missions to Maximise Joy, which sounds like a good way to look at life in general.

Alley Cat Games has Ada’s Dream, which is a great theme for a game and we’re curious about their solo choose-your-own adventure game Fate Flip: Washed Ashore.

Board & Dice has Windmill Valley, a game so aggressively tulipy Dutch, that we can’t help but smile every time we see it. They gave us a quick overview during Spiel and it looked a little less complex than most of their games so it might be right up our alley.

Osprey Games has nothing new at the expo but have promised to have preview materials of their upcoming games. Of course, we’re curious what they’ll be showing of Undaunted Callisto but we’ve also had a friend ask to take a look at War Story: Occupied France, so we’ll be sure to take some pictures for him.

We probably missed a ton of good games and we haven’t even looked into the events, and we still need to pack! Oh my, it’s time to end this blog post.

Apollo turned 13! He is still our lovable cat idiot who asks for attention at the most unfortunate moments. He loves lounging in the backyard during these sunny days and tricking the neighbors’ dogs into barking at him so the dog gets into trouble. He also tends to throw up at night (just hair, don’t worry), sometimes making our mornings a game of ‘notice the mysterious puddles before stepping in them!’. Last week, for the first time, he threw up while standing on some game boxes and while the damage was minimal (phew!), it did inspire this comic! 😅

This week we played no new games, which is quite a rarity in our house but we did get to revisit some old ones.

We played two games of Agricola because a friend bought the very fancy Agricola 15 edition, we’ve kept it pretty basic so far and haven’t played around with things like the X-deck. We do enjoy it a lot but we’re starting to realize how impactful the cards you receive at the beginning are on your final result. Maybe we need to start using the draft variant, although that will lengthen the game quite a bit.

I played my second game of Kill Team, after my Orks did very poorly in the first game I decided to run a Custodes team this time and did a lot better, only losing with one victory point difference in the end. I enjoy Kill Team more than regular 40k as a game and the lesser amount of time commitment but the game offers just a bit more tactical options than Grimdark Future: Firefight so it doesn’t feel too dice-driven. The friends I’m playing it with are tinkering with the idea of playing a campaign of it, which should tell you how much we like it.

We also played Above and Below and it’s still one of the most cozy games ever created. I like how everyone who plays it chooses fun over trying to win even when the game does offer loads of ways to optimize your score. Honestly, I was shocked at how much simpler it is compared to Ryan’s later games like Near and Far and Sleeping Gods. I realized that I kinda missed this simpler look in Arzium.

This week we’ll probably play Descent, we’ve almost completed Act 1 and it’s probably my favorite dungeon-crawler campaign so far. Other than that, we have no plans other than a strong desire to play the Forest Shuffle expansion we got this weekend.

We don’t really care if we win or lose a game, we just like hanging out with friends, exploring new games, and enjoy seeing cool strategies and ways to approach a game we already know. this is probably a reason we’re not big on gaming tournaments as we don’t think playing the game for hours on end surrounded by people who have analyzed a game to the finest detail. We’ve also realized that losing is something you learn by playing and losing lots of games. Especially when we talk to friends who are introducing their kids to games, we often hear that their kids will stop enjoying the game once they have a feeling they won’t be able to win. How people learn to deal with losing a game is very different though, as we can see in today’s comic.

Speaking of losing, Rachel won a lot of games this week! Every other Tuesday we play online games with friends and because one of the friends wasn’t able to join our regular session of Anno 1800, we switched to Golf with your Friends, followed by some games of Can’t Stop on Board Game Arena (cheeky referral link so we can’t get some free premium months). We think Can’t Stop is a classic and we were happy our friends now also know the joys of Can’t Stop even though Rachel won two out of the three games. 😉

We also played Aqua again, we’re still not 100% convinced of how much we like it but now that we’re a bit more experienced in it, we feel it’s a better game than our first impression led us to believe. We made a post over on Instagram giving some tips to take away some of our initial frustration, so if you are playing your first game of Aqua soon, you might want to check that out. (For the record, Rachel won.)

Our big game for this week was a game of Battlestar Galactica, including the Pegasus expansion! Since it was quite a while since our last game our friend decided to skip the ‘New Caprica’ portion of the expansion but did include the Pegasus board, the Cylon leaders, and the treachery skills cards. Even though the Cylons were revealed very quickly, I was executed in the first round and the other Cylon was instantly ousted as soon as he received his sleeper agent card, the humans just made the last jump before the full armada of Cylon ships was able to take down the humans giving Rachel, and two other players, the win. Battlestar Galactica is very much a game from a specific period in Fantasy Flight Games history, with loads of tiny cards, quite a bit of randomness, and a long playtime but it is super enjoyable and I was impressed I still had enough to do as a Cylon after I was executed in the first round thanks to the additions of the Pegasus expansion. We might need to see if Unphatomable can scratch that same itch as a second-hand copy of BSG, let alone its expansions, are not the sort of investment we’re willing to make.

Lastly, we played Agricola and Gap at a friend’s house ending Rachel’s winning streak…! Haha!

This week we’re continuing our Descent campaign, playing some more Threads of Fate and have a game of Stationfall planned, so expect loads of cool big games in our next weekly recap video!

As I am typing this, I am also checking my ongoing game of 18Chesapeake in which someone just dumped a company on me and I’m furiously calculating if I’ll survive the oncoming escalation of rusting locomotives. I like using 18xx.games as it really can automate a lot of the more tedious calculations out of the game and just get to enjoy the backstabbing and route laying part of 18xx games. And this week, a friend noticed Feudum is on Tabletopia and Deep Print Games posted that their space version of Mombasa (which is in our opinion very underrated)  Skymines is now on Yucata. So it seems like it’s a great time for people to enjoy games online.

Luckily, we also enjoyed loads of games offline! On Monday we played two games of Run. While we played it before, it was during the deluge of new games we got at Spiel and we played this one when we were a bit too tired to enjoy it. I happy we tried it again because it’s a very clever and short hidden movement game for two players. It’s less abstract than Fugitive as it has a map with things moving around, but it isn’t as big as Letters of Whitechapel or Sniper Elite. The production design is also great as the tiles are designed in such a way that accidentally cheating can’t happen, so you’ll know you have only your deduction skills to blame if the runner gets away. Like Mind MGMT this game also gives you new powers, or takes powers away based on how much you’ve won playing a certain role to make sure the games are always tense and exciting.
On Thursday, we played a very close game of Starship Captains and we’re wondering how we always end up so close while the game seems fairly random. While the first player scored six points more than second place, the difference between second and last place was only 1,5 points. We hope this one gets an expansion to smooth out the slightly jarring balance between being a gateway game while also requiring you to play as hard as you can to get anywhere, as it has loads of great ideas that we would like to see explored a bit more.

On Friday we played 5 Towers, which worked well as a warm-up game while waiting for the last player to arrive, it’s also has more easter eggs than any other game we can remember which resulted in a lot of disrupting “look it’s that thing!” while people we trying to figure out if pushing their luck was the best way to go. We also played Whirling Witchcraft for the first time in a while but we’re very happy with the Golden Standee we awarded it in 2021. The whole game is about producing so many resources it won’t fit on the player board of the player on your right, which results in a joyously frustrating moment at the end of each turn as you notice the player to your left is giving you even more frogs than you anticipated. This is a great game if you are looking for something light to get people interested in modern board games.

We also played Wormholes which was fun but I feel like we need to play some more to understand its rhythm and see how strategic you can get. All five who played did enjoy it though, which is great after we’ve been trying to get it played by a bigger group for a year and a half now. It’s a pick-up-and-deliver game in which you ferry passengers from one planet to another, the twist, however, is that you are also able to create wormholes and you can use other player’s wormholes as well. This causes travel times in the game to become a lot shorter after a few rounds and, because of the haphazard-way routes tend to link together, the fastest way to get from A to B can suddenly be a very non-straightforward affair.

Lastly, we felt like solving a murder so we grabbed Chronicles of Crime 1900 and we crushed it! We scored 120 of 100 points, we’re not sure how that works, but the citizens of Paris can sleep safely in the knowledge that justice is served! I personally still think this is my favorite murder mystery format, with Suspects being a close second. The app allows the writers to create more robust scenarios that react to your actions during the game which helps with the immersion. The 1900 cases also include some light escape room-style puzzles, which are a bit on the easy side, but work well in the genre.

This week we’re playing with some new people we’ve known for quite a while but never realized they like board games as well, so that should be fun! We’ll also, if the post office is willing, be receiving some games we wanted to play for quite some time, so that should be exciting as well. 🙂

Happy New Year! We hope you had a lovely New Year’s Eve and could play some games. We did three games of Flash Point: Fire Rescue because a friend found the Honor and Duty expansion which features two very tricky maps. The first one is a metro station, which was narrowly won on our first try but the Airplane map is a tough hard map that will beat you over the head with some serious structural damages and hard-to-reach POI. It’s a shame that, at least in the Netherlands, Flash Point: Fire Rescue seems to have been forgotten as it’s a really easy-to-play exciting co-op with a pretty unique theme. Hopefully, it will get a reprint or a new edition soon so more people can enjoy it again.

Speaking of being able to enjoy a certain game again. We lent out our copy of Forest Shuffle after only playing one game because we thought we didn’t have any time to play it but we missed it a lot more than we imagined we would…

Whoops! We aren’t the biggest fans of Terraforming Mars as it takes a bit too long but Forest Shuffle has that same open tableau-building feel in a much shorter period. In the game, you’re trying to build the most successful forest by planting trees and populating them with animals, birds, bats, insects, and plants. The animal and plant cards are divided into two sections, allowing you to either place an animal on the left or right side of the tree or cards that allow you to place birds at the top and plants (or insects, small animals, or amphibians) at the bottom. While this is a wonderful mechanism, it also leads to offering you a very high number of choices within the cards in your hand. Keeping track of all that information might require you to adapt this special technique shown in the comic of sorting the cards to keep track of all your choices. 😉

We also played quite a bit of Rollecate and Quibbles last week because after discovering Quibbles last week, we wanted to explore Michiel de Wit’s games some more. We don’t talk about Rollecate a lot but we think it’s a game that will take some time for you to ‘click’ as it has a unique blend of push your luck and negative scoring, that you can offset by collecting sets of the same number and that requires you to rewire your brain a bit. The American version is called Loose Caboose! btw if you’re interested in learning more about it.

Lastly, we played our second game of Critical: Sanctuary which is a lovely light RPG for people who like the idea of role-playing games but might not want to invest in four-hour D&D sessions and reading loads of text trying to create a character. While the box suggests every scenario only takes thirty minutes, our sessions seem to take about an hour, which is probably because we want to enjoy the characters by having silly voices and having some banter between everyone. It works for us! Rachel who GMs can prepare the session in fifteen minutes of skimming the rules and we can have a quick little adventure. Its setting has some jarring colonial adventure tropes like savage natives, so if that is not your thing you might want to steer clear of it or try Critical: Foundation, which has a cyberpunk setting using the same ruleset instead.

Tomorrow we’re trying Nucleum! So it’s time to end this blog post and dive into its rulebook to see how to play this literally and figuratively heavy beast of a game!