We only played two games this week, which is a bit of a shame but on the other hand, it makes it easier for me to quickly write a blog post and enjoy the Liberation festivities today! For those who aren’t Dutch, on May 4th we commemorate all the people who passed in conflict since World War 2 (if you wonder why I’m grumpy about Star Wars day being on May the 4th, now you know why) and on May 5th we celebrate we live in freedom because of the sacrifices and hard work of so many brave people all over the world. You can visit free concerts all over the country, see old-timer military parades, and other fun stuff.

But you’ll probably see some of it during next week’s video – let’s talk a little about the games we played last week!

Illimat is a special game, it was made based on album art of the Decemberists (a band we have fond memories of) and it’s made to feel like an old card game, with lingo that feels old and some strategies that won’t emerge until you’ve played several games. We love the look of it and the care that has been put into the components. There is a cool cloth board, small mysterious metallic figures, and lovely big tarot cards that change the rules in interesting ways. We hadn’t played it in a while, but we were talking about it with some friends, so we wanted to play it again. The new second edition rules clarify some of the more confusing rules, which made getting back in the game a breeze.

We also played more Middara, and while we cheated this last scenario a little (on the last move on the end, we accidentally unlocked an optional extra part of the map, which would with 99% certainty would have lost us the scenario), we still think it’s a great dungeon crawler so far. I think one of the best design decisions these games can make is to focus on a small set of named characters. Gloomhaven doesn’t do this, which made us not care about its story as any of its characters could be in any scene, the writing ignored the player characters and it was mostly NPCs telling you about the world before sending you on a quest. Descent and Middara characters have personalities (which we love to voice act, poorly) that drive the plot in more interesting ways than “we need to defeat the evil”. There seems to be a bit of a tonal shift in this second chapter, and I’m curious if they will do this for the other three chapters after this one as well.

That’s it for this week, see you next week!