We are very lucky that we live in a city that has quite a big board game culture in a country that already has a big board gaming culture. We have three great board gaming stores within a half hour traveling time by bicycle and there are loads of people who love board games. We suspect the main reason is that our city has a technical university which means a lot of people have had a phase in which they played Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Warhammer or Dungeons and Dragons.

That being said, except for participating in a couple of Netrunner tournaments, we’ve never been a part of board gaming clubs as we have enough friends to fill loads of game nights. One of our friends is a member of a board game club however and the club had a board game day on Saturday so we went to try some evil strategies went to meet new people and play some fun games. We had a good time playing a three-player game of Root and a five-player game of Brian Boru. The last time we played Brian Boru was a while ago and now that we’ve played some more trick-taking games it was great to revisit it. We had a good time and the club members were very keen to make sure we felt welcome so we can recommend checking out the Order of the Dice meetups if you happen to live near Enschede, and want to hang out with some other board gamers.

While we had fun at the gaming club the main event was playing a demo copy of Neon Hope. It’s a narrative card game like the Arkham Horror LCG but it uses a more limited deck of cards per player that reminded us of Gloomhaven. This is a major advantage, for us at least, as we don’t need to build a full deck to start playing. This is something that has stopped us from getting Earthborne Rangers as we feel the commitment is a bit too much for us. Neon Hope is very different thematically though, as you play characters figuring out a big tech company’s big secret project which is situated in a cyberpunk/solarpunk version of Berlin.

We already played part of the demo at Spiel and it was probably the best thing we played while were there. Luckily, it held up and the second playthrough was still as solid. In this demo scenario, you’re trying to find a friend who wants to meet in a nightclub, so you use cards and skills to ask around, look around the dance floor, hack some surveillance cameras and fight some corporate goons that are also interested in the whereabouts of your friend. Like Arkham LCG it’s able to communicate its story through creative card design. We like that ‘corporate loyalists’ are weaker than the ‘freelance security guards’ but they are much harder to get away from.

The game is also filled with little nods to other cyberpunk universes, the club name in the scenario is called Syphon and its logo is pretty close to the Netrunner credit icon, and at one point they mention Kreuzbasar which is the name of the neighborhood you use as a base of operation in Shadowrun: Dragonfall. So we hope their upcoming Kickstarter is a success and we get to see the other four scenario’s they designed once the full game is out.

Happy New Year, may your workers never get blocked, and may your rules explanations go well! We had a lovely week celebrating the new year, meeting family, playing games, and… buying our very first car!

This comic is a sequel to last week’s comic about board game challenges. Personally, I love making everything an ‘event’, I can’t just watch a movie, I need to turn it into a marathon, and every game day I propose we turn it into a mini tournament. That’s why I love putting together challenges to pair up games or seek out games that offer something strange and unique, especially if it is hard to organize. Speaking of which, does anyone want to play This Discord Has Ghosts In It? We just need fifteen people and a Discord server… or maybe some Long time listener, last time caller? We just need a podcast studio and some people calling in.

Although we didn’t play anything that wild this week, we did play Rococo on New Year’s Eve, which meant we got to enjoy some actual fireworks after the fireworks in the game, which was a fun touch. It was our first play of Rococo and we enjoyed it as it was a game that has quite a bit of rules but the thematic focus of all the different parts make sense once you know the rules. It reminded us a lot of Distilled in that way and we think if you enjoy one of these games, you’ll also enjoy the other.

We also played some more Trio, which is still a blast, and some Cat Lady while slowly waking up on January 1st, which is the perfect chill game for that situation. We also tried a four-player game of A Fake Artist Goes to New York, only to realize it doesn’t really work and the game tried to warn us by putting a minimum of five players on the box… 😅

We played three more runs of Dead Cells and defeated the first boss! The options that were presented to us after defeating the boss are a nice step up in complexity but the game also gives an incentive to replay the first biomes of the game to unlock cards from a “deck of secrets”. It’s really interesting to see a game designed around quick-playing rounds to get you to the serotonin-inducing phase of unlocking extra stuff at the end of the game and I suspect more campaign games might adapt to this format in the future as it doesn’t make you feel forced to finish a campaign, or even play it with the same group, but just enjoy a game and know at the end that it will be slightly more expanded next time.

Lastly, we played some Super Rhino Hero Battle with my six-year-old niece which was great! It’s funny to realize how much unconscious engineering knowledge adults apply when building giant skyscrapers out of cards, when you see a child build things in a way that’ll make your toes curl. Somehow the contraption survived a long time every game and she got to experience the wonder when looking at the giant structures that you’ll end up with near the end of the game.

That was all for this week. Gaming wise we have no concrete plans yet but I can tell you next week we’ll make fun of something else in case you were starting to get annoyed about the administrative nerdy side of an already nerdy hobby. 😉

2024 is another year in which we won’t complete our 10×10 challenge! We’ve got to 7*10 which is quite an average ending for us, although we did manage to set some records this year.

We played most different (new) games of any year, 177 (for now) different games of which 104 were new to us. If we manage to squeeze in three games before midnight tomorrow we’ll end up having logged 386 plays which would beat our record for the most logged plays in a year. That being said this is a byproduct of just hanging out with our lovely friends who just happen to love board games as well and we have so many plans with friends to try other games.

This year we did play some great games and I think we should bring back the Golden Standees, or at least do a social media post of games we enjoyed the most or surprised us in some way. Games like Dead Cells and War Story: Occupied France and City of Six Moons impressed us by putting a new spin on Campaign games, choose-your-own-adventure-games and “what a game can be” respectively and we suspect their influence will be seen in multiple games in the coming years. We’ve also played some upcoming games like Neon Hope and Katmai that we really want use our influence to make sure people know about it. We might not be able to fill a whole week full of blog posts about it like SpaceBiff but we should be able to put out something insightful. If you have anything you want us to talk about, let us know in the comments!

This week we played a lot of games in between all the festivities but, except for Ratjack, which is a very interesting mix between Love Letter and Black Jack that we should explore a bit more, it was all old favorites! We played a very tense and exciting four-player game of Joyride, which is the perfect player amount for this game. We also introduced Rachel’s nephews to the joys of Robot Quest Arena and The Wolves during which they both showed how quickly they could apply their video game knowledge into cool strategies for games they had never played before.

During our Christmas day off, we played two runs of Dead Cells and didn’t defeat the first boss again… although we are getting closer and closer every time, so hopefully next time we’ll get him and we can start exploring the other biome this game has to offer.

Finally, we played a very slow game of Northgard, which took quite a bit longer because everybody was tired after a week full of visits and grand feasts but it was loads of fun. The monster module in the game makes for a unique 4X experience in which you’re heavily being suppressed by wolves, bears, and undead interfering with your strategies. We’re very curious to see more of the big expansion they’ve planned for next year.

For our last day of the year, we’ll play our first-ever game of Roccoco and probably some games of Trio, which is a delightful game that I think might make it to the Can’t Stop/6 Nimmt echelons of the “best games” of all time on our list. After that, we’ll have a whole new year to play some more games!

A game that mentions in its rulebook to the players that they should treat it as a racing game. It’s something we first encountered in the manual of Tribes of the Wind and found very odd. To be fair, it is a better game if you approach it that way because otherwise, the score will always end in a (near) tie.
Ancient Knowledge was less explicitly saying it in the rulebook but we discovered our own you had to play it as a racing game on after I overwhelmingly won a game after trying to see how quickly you could finish the game. When we mentioned it to someone from the Flat Rivier Group, who distributes the game, they mentioned that the expansion did mention it in the rulebook as it was an important part of the game.

While we enjoy both games, especially Ancient Knowledge, we do wonder if having to mention something like this to the players is a shortcoming of its design. The theme of both games, Tribes of the Wind is about rebuilding Earth after a climate change disaster and Ancient Knowledge is about building a civilization, don’t feel like it’s going to be a race. Both games also offer plenty of ways to build scoring engines that don’t lean towards speeding up the game. So a player like Rachel has to suppress her interest in exploring combos to keep up with a player like me who is more into hitting the end game triggers fast.

Speaking of games that do things a little differently, we played “a Fake Artist Goes to New York” for the first time, which is a bit weird as we made a comic about it six years ago! It’s a hidden role-drawing game in which all the players know what to draw, except for one player. A small piece of paper is passed around the table and every “artist” draws a single line. After the piece of paper has done two full rotations across the table the artist gets to vote for who they think is the fake artist. If they guess correctly the fake artist has one chance to guess what they were drawing together to pull out a last-minute win. It’s a great and fun game that prevents the artist from drawing something else as they won’t gain any information about who might be the fake artist. We can’t wait to play it a lot more and frame all the tiny strange drawings to form a mini exposition in our house.

We also played Middle Ages, we love the bigger games Studio H games like Oltree and Northgard but this one was a lot lighter and quicker than those games. It’s a new version of Majesty: For the Realm or if you don’t know that (as we did) it has some overlap with King Domino. We thought it was a pretty clever design thought it might not be the best with two as some of its take-that elements don’t feel great with just one opponent. Luckily, the rules are easy and the games are short, so we should not have a problem trying it with some more friends.

We also played some other games that we’ve played before like Ransom Notes, which is probably one of our favorite “a jury member chooses the funniest response” in which you use word magnets to make sentences. We also played more Undaunted Callisto is a very cool and dynamic twist on the classic Undaunted. Lastly, we continued our Middara campaign which does so many things well it’s a bit of a shame the art is so “cheesecake”-y.

This week we have some cool games planned with a dexterity games evening and we playing the second scenario of War Story, which left a very strong impression after the first one.

We play many different games; the reason is a combination of publishers sending us games (thank you, publishers!), having friends who are into board games (thank you, friends!), and me wanting to play every game ever made at least once. I love trying new games, especially if they have something I haven’t seen before mechanically or are impractical but epic in some sort of way (more on that later).

The problem with my love for trying new games is that I can be a bit too excited, always wanting to try new games, which has left Rachel and some friends annoyed with me. It turns out that sometimes people don’t want a game night to start with a rules explanation; they just want to enjoy a game and hang out with friends.

This week, however, was my week of only new and/or impractical games! We got to play Arcs for the first time on Thursday, which made quite an impression. We only played the basic game without Leaders and Lore, nor did we try the campaign. It feels like a Cole Wehrle design in the way quite abstract and simple actions feel very thematic in the overall context of the game, creating a very deep system that you’ll need to play many times to get a grip on. While we’re not the biggest trick-taking fans, we didn’t mind the way it’s incorporated here as you have enough room to force important actions. We’re hoping we can play it a few more times before starting a campaign, and it also made us want to replay Galactic Renaissance again. We feel like that stealthy/political area-control game hasn’t made a big splash, which is a shame because we enjoyed the games we’ve played so far.

On Friday, our good friends Chris and Els came over to play Dune Imperium: Uprising, and they also brought delicious homemade hazelnut cakes! We never played the original Dune Imperium and were surprised that some of our favorite parts like the spice spies, the worms, and the shield wall, are all new additions in the Uprising version. Without those additions, we suspect it was a solid but by-the-numbers deckbuilder/worker placement type of game. Our first impression of Uprising was that it’s thematically and mechanically a very fun game that we highly recommend checking out.

On Saturday, we played Katmai: Bears of the Brooks River, and it’s a nice addition to Osprey Games’ strong current lineup. It’s a lane battler like Air, Land, and Sea, but it’s different enough to be its own thing. You strategically place your bear cards along a river, hoping to create the strongest bear force at seven fishing spots. Once everybody places their bear cards and resolves any abilities on the cards, the player who wins at a fishing spot gets to place their Beeple (they’re actually called Beeple in the rulebook!) on one of the four spots on the tile. You score points if you place your Beeples in such a way that it completes different scoring objectives, like making a specific pattern. It adds a nice spatial puzzle to the lane battler and gives the game an arc because, once a Beeple is placed, it stays there for the rest of the game. We love the vibe of the game and the fact that a big part of the rulebook tells you about the real bears of the Katmai Conservatory, instead of just telling you about the game itself. It also made us think of Odin’s Ravens, another great two-player game in a small box from the same publisher.

Lastly, on Sunday, I played the gloriously epic but impractical War Room. It was my fifth time, with mostly the same six players as the previous game, and we were still unable to finish a game within twelve hours. War Room is a World War II wargame in which two teams of three players gather around a very large map with loads of units and croupier sticks to “simulate” the entire conflict. It uses secret orders like Diplomacy, and its battle system strikes a nice balance between just rolling dice and giving yourself some tactical choices on how to use your units. We couldn’t finish the game (again), but I did do some live reporting on BlueSky if you’re curious about how the game went.

This week we’re continuing our journey through Midarra and we’re having a six-player game night for which we’ll happily accept suggestions for games in the comments. 🙂

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.