We sometimes forget not everyone gets excited about the obscure, the unreleased, or the obnoxiously rare promo. Our minds are completely enamored with getting our new games played so we had to smile a little when a friend asked if we could bring Wingspan because he heard good things! Luckily, Wingspan is a great game so we happily obliged him, while secretly wishing we had picked up the fan art pack if we knew we were going to play Wingspan. 😉

This week was a busy week but we packed in quite a bit of gaming on Friday night. The night started off with two five-player games of Robot Quest Arena! The game is exactly what we hoped it would be, a fun, chaotic arena battle game built on top of the Star Realms deckbuilding engine. The designers did a very clever thing, mostly making it all about scoring points and not about scoring kills, any damage you do gets you a point, and destroying an opponent gets you two points. Getting destroyed has no real downside as you respawn at the start of your turn and the arena is small enough, at least with five players, that you always have an opportunity to score some points. This keeps everything moving along smoothly, with no missed turns making rushing in and hitting opponents a viable strategy. It’s also cool that pushing and ramming your opponents into objects and walls is possible, which ties in nicely with some tiles granting you bonuses if you start your turn on one of those. If we had to say anything negative, we thought that optimizing your decks seems a bit of an underpowered strategy so far, although that might be because the arena is slightly crowded at five players making just attacking everything in sight very lucrative. But all in all, we love it and can heartily recommend it if you want an easily understandable and fun game about smashing robots together that supports higher player numbers (with the expansions).

We followed this up with some short games of Tinderblox, which is a great dexterity game in a small tin we talked about before, and then played some games of Klask! It had been a while but Klask is a very good air hockey alternative that fits on smaller tables. Every time we play it, we talk about how we should organize a small tournament for it, so maybe we should make it a point for next year!

On Sunday we played Run, a new hidden movement game by Fowers Games. We don’t not what Fower’s fascination is with crime and chase games but they’re always very very good. Run is designed by Moritz Dressler in which one player is the runner trying to escape the dispatch player who is flying around in a helicopter trying to hit the runner twice before they collect three gadgets and are able to reach a safe house. Like the new version of Fugitive, Run has built-in options to keep it interesting for players of different skill levels. Our first game had the arc of a good hidden movement game, the runner feeling powerful at the start with a net slowly closing around them and the dispatcher winning the last turn on a hunch, so we’re excited to play some more!

We also played another of The White Castle and we’re convinced this one might be a game that will be talked about in the board gaming hobby for several years. It’s just a very smart game that with its very flexible setup doesn’t allow you to coast on the same strategy as last time. In our previous game, the castle and military track were very powerful and because of the absence of rice, the bridge part of the game was mostly neglected, this time it was the other way around with the farmer being the key to unlocking incredible combos. The Dutch version is also only €30 which is a great price for such an expert-level game that works great for two and four players (maybe also solo and three players but we haven’t tried that).

This week, we both have some days off so who knows what we’ll play!