Getting friends excited to try new games is something everyone with a bigger board games collection will run into and it requires knowing what would be a good ‘hook’ to persuade certain people. We have some friends that don’t like certain art styles, or games that lean on role-playing, so we know we’ll have to find some other enticing aspect to get people interested. Often this is the theme or certain components, or maybe just saying it won’t take THAT long. 😉 We don’t try to trick people into playing games they don’t want to play but sometimes you have to lure them out of their comfort zone a bit so they can experience something we think/hope they will enjoy.

The fun thing about this is that it’s not only gamers doing this to each other, but publishers doing it as well. Anytime Vital Lacerda and Ian O’ Toole team up we’re so tempted to get the game even though they are too heavy for us to enjoy or even get to the table regularly, but just look at the Weather Machine cover! You just want to live in it!

Speaking of games with a great hook, yesterday we played some Gods Love Dinosaurs and it’s just full of cool little details and mechanics that get us excited. We haven’t heard a whole lot of hype around it since its release last year but the smart ecosystem building mechanic combined with some delightful animeeple figures are great. We definitely going to introduce this to some friends to play it at higher player counts. We also took a little holiday in a wooden mobile home and played two games of Rummikub as the mobile home contained a small collections of games like Yathzee, Chess and Rummikub. Rachel had only played it a few times in her life it but for me it’s a game that used to get played loads during family camping trips, so playing it while staying in a mobile home gave it just a bit more of a vacation vibe. We did notice that the way my family plays it might not be fully within the rules but it does offer a bit more combo potential. It’s a bit hard to put into words but our family has the rule that if for example, you swap out a joker with a tile for your board, you’re also allowed to use additional tiles from your board to make a new series using the joker. The rules sort of seem to hint that these multi-step turns might not be legal but since it makes the joker less powerful we kept it in. We were also reminded that the Rummikub joker is a very scary piece of board game art…

This week we’ll be playing What Next from Big Potato and we’re very excited about it. A choose-your-own-adventure game mixed with dexterity challenges seems like a fun gimmick that has to potential to be very immersive. We’ll very likely post some videos and photo’s on social media without getting too spoilery.

Cubes are the best! While a miniature or even a standee can only be one thing or a set of similar things, a red cube can be anything from a Welsh follower to a wound! That’s why we collected 71 different cubes from some of our favorite games to present you with this handy guide into the world of cubes and their meaning. If you ever find a random cube in your house again you can quickly see what it might be!

Ironically, we didn’t play any game containing cubes this week, although we did continue the Lost Ruins of Arnak solo campaign that requires you to add some cubes from other games as a story marker. Where now halfway through the campaign and while we are able to complete the goals we are nowhere near scoring enough points to beat our automated opponent, we can only hope this doesn’t come back to bite us like a snake hidden in the bushes…

We also got tricked into playing a game! A friend has been trying for years to play Imperial 2030 but wasn’t able to get enough people excited about a game that’s about trading in obligations and going to war for profit. This weekend, however, he invited us for a game day and he had already set up the game, so there was no escape. While we thought the idea of having a war game in which the player that controls a country can switch because of stocks is interesting, it went on for a little too long to really recommend it. If a designer would be able to turn this into a version that could be played in an hour or 90 minutes, this would be a very interesting game.

We hope you have a great week and don’t forget about our ongoing giveaways over on our Instagram!

We’ve spent so much time playing the Star Realms app, we even participated in a Clash of Creators season battling other board game content creators in Star Realms. When Wise Wizards announced they were doing a Hero Realms app we remembered the old viral news that a Google Pacman doodle supposedly had cost the economy several hundreds of millions of dollars and that’s how the comic came about. The Star Realms/Hero Realms games are easy but very fun deck builders and we definitely recommend them if you are looking for something to introduce people into games or just want something quick and cheap to play. Hero Realms can even be expanded upon with a co-op campaign but we haven’t tried that yet.

Speaking of things that are quick and fun, Adam New and his crew have been making these fun comic dub of our comics and the latest one is a video version of the classic comic Field Research. Not only is it cool to have “ourselves” voiced by other people, but it’s also fun to see what creative choices they’ve made in translating a static comic into something moving. Check it out on Youtube!

This week we didn’t play a lot of games but we did finally play Terraforming Mars! We really enjoy it so far although we’ve only played with the basic corporations and no variants. I can see how the drafting variant can make offer some more room for a strategy which sounds good. We are surprised at how heavy BGG rates it. With a 3.24 the score is a lot higher than other tableau games like London 2nd Edition, Roll for the Galaxy, or even Wingspan which we think have just as much going on. Maybe we’re missing some sort of intricate layer of strategy we haven’t seen after two plays?

We also got our first three-player game in of Brew which is just as brutal as with two players but you’ve got to be even more on your toes. I think a lot of people will enjoy this a lot as long as you know this game is mean and requires you to really interfere with the plans of other players to win. With most games being only around six actions per round, and four rounds per game every action counts! You should also know that the forest you are trying to save will get burned down in the battle for dominance which is a very funny disconnect from the cute theme and the brutal way this game plays.

This week will play some more Gloomhaven as always but we’ll also have a Magic: the Gathering draft of the new Forgotten Realms set. We, and the people we’re drafting with, haven’t played Magic in years (or even more than a decade!) and the shopkeep at the FLGS looked very confused when we bought the boosters so that’s going to be fun!

Getting games to your table is a long process that involves multiple parties getting the right things from point A to B. At the moment, there is a global container crisis going which is hitting the board game industry hard. On Twitter, we heard from publishers that they have to pay up to 1000% for shipping. Understandably, nobody takes that sort of price hikes into account while making a budget so tough choices will have to be made. Expect upcoming games and backed Kickstarters to come in a little later.

Something that we tend to forget is that most board game publishers are very small, even bigger companies are between five and ten people. It’s easy to forget when you get frustrating news about a game you are looking forward to but please stay reasonable and polite because these small teams are probably going through some very scary times at the moment. You probably have some other games on your shelves you’ve yet to play or take the time to grab an old favorite.

Speaking of “old” favorites, this week we played Gloomhaven and Wingspan. It’s a bit strange to realize Wingspan is just two years old and Gloomhaven has just been out for four years. Luckily, both are still great but would recommend them to completely different people.
Gloomhaven is a long campaign that requires you to learn a whole lot of rules and see the big picture while also spot opportunities to succeed. This was our 47th game of Gloomhaven and we honestly have no idea how far we are along with the campaign but our best guess is that we’re just past the 50 percent mark, which means we will probably finish in 2023 if we keep up the current pace.
Wingspan, on the other hand, is a bit tricky to explain to people that are not used to tableau-building games. But once you understand the rules, you can have a fun hour-long game enjoying birds and making all kinds of powerful combos! It is amazing that board games can bring two such different experiences while both being considered one of the best games in the past couple of years.

This week, we’re continuing our Pandemic Legacy Season 0 campaign and we’ll celebrate Rachel’s birthday!

Getting a new game is always exciting, you always want to get it played as soon as possible, sometimes forgetting that you will also need to teach it to your unsuspecting friends… 

We always make sure that when we bring a new game to read the rules in advance and most of the time I set up the game and mimic some of the moves in the game to get a feel for how the different components and rules go together. Sometimes, however, life gets in the way and we try to do a last-minute rule read just before, or even when everybody is at the table and that mostly doesn’t end well. Before you know it you’ve done an hour-long reading of the rulebook at game night with little time to actually enjoy the game.

Learning a game can be difficult, especially if you are the one that is the person “hosting” the game. You will need to have all the rules in your head to turn it into a nice instruction at the start of the game plus you’ll probably need to keep an eye out for people making accidental illegal plays during their first games. We can’t imagine working in a board game cafe and having to memorize so many different games.

Luckily for us this week we only needed to learn one game and it was Brew, sent to us by Pandasaurus, that we’re very excited about. The game looks amazing and it turns out it offers loads of ways to optimize your plays, mostly by making very aggressive moves and blocking or even nullifying your opponent’s hard work. While the game’s tagline is “bring balance back to the forest”, we approached balance a bit differently by burning down large parts of the forest to secure more victory points.

This week we have no gaming plans at all, except for one game of Gloomhaven! So it’s time to look at the shelf and see what old favorites we’ll finally get the attention they deserve!

Lost Ruins of Arnak was kindly provided by CGE for free. We thank them for giving us this game that led to this comic! For more information on how we deal with gifted games, please see our FAQ.

Lost Ruins of Arnak was probably our favorite Spiel release of last year. We know we’re not the only ones loving Lost Ruins of Arnak because every time we see somebody talking about it online, loads of people react to it how they really like it as well. This got us wondering how “lost” can these ruins be considered if everybody loves the game so much? This resulted in visions of the Lost Ruins of Arnak slowly turning into a tourist attraction filled with gift shops and people waiting in line to see the ancient temple.

Lost Ruins of Arnak also has received a Kennierspiel nomination and along with Paleo, we think both games deserve the win for different reasons. Paleo has a bit more innovative things going on but Lost Ruins of Arnak just flows so well on every level. Fantasy Realms might be good as well btw. but we only played it once a few years ago, so we don’t really have an opinion about it.

So let’s talk about games we do have an opinion on, Pandemic Legacy Season 0! We only played the prologue game as it took us a bit longer than expected to get through the rules. They weren’t that complicated we were just easily distracted by trying to catch up with our friends. We got pretty excited about the possibilities of the design as it still feels like Pandemic but the changes to make it a Cold War spy thriller seem to make anything possible during the campaign. The fake passports are also super fun and it might be our favorite game component ever made. We’ll see how things progress once we get to actually see the campaign play out.

I also played my first game of Warmaster. This epic-scale miniature game in the Warhammer Fantasy universe is something I wanted to try for years and while the combat rules are a bit unclear, me and my opponent had a great time pushing tiny miniatures across the table and seeing knights crash into seas of undead units. So it’s time to reread the free Warmaster Revolution rulebook and plan another game!