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April 11th is Semi Co-op’s 9th anniversary! Woooh! Honestly, we can’t believe it’s already been that long. Since then… *grabs a calculator* we’ve published around 664 comics! Holy moly! And somehow we still have ideas for new comics and sometimes I wonder how we manage that. Luckily, the board game industry evolves quickly so there is much to joke about.
This is also a moment I’d like to give a shoutout to our patrons for whose support we are really grateful. If you ever think “I need more silly board game comics in my life”, we continued publishing Sketchie comics on our Patreon page as a special thank you.

It’s been an interesting and busy week! We were surprised by a lovely package by Pencil First Games containing Sunset Over Water and Maul Peek. We ended up playing both games this weekend and while they are completely different games, we both really enjoyed them! Sunset Over Water is what we’d call a cozy game in its setting (you make and sell pretty paintings of landscapes) and beautiful art. And while it was a relaxed game with two players, we think the game will change a lot when playing with four players. Player tokens block each other’s movement and available landscapes in the game and with two players, there’s less confrontation. We’ll have to see this in action but getting Sunset Over Water to the table won’t be a problem. 🙂

Maul Peek is an asymmetrical two-player game in which one player controls a band of raging Bears and the other player the colossal creature (guardians) they are fighting. The production quality of this game is stunning. The lovely wooden meeples,  the high-quality art, and all the different playable Guardians and the Bears come in their own little deck box which makes setup very quick. Our first game was really close, the Bears defeated the guardian Saboso but all the Bears (but one) were defeated and one more hit would have been the end of the Bears. The game has a strong end-boss battling vibe because the Bears have to climb the Guardian (on a separate board) and attack different parts of the Guardian. This way, the Bears can eliminate certain actions of the Guardian but the Guardian also has actions that can throw off the Bears. We’re looking forward to exploring this one more and there’s quite a lot to explore with four different Guardians!

Another game we played last week is Ancient Knowledge. Heinze made it more of a racing game this time and that worked out really well for him and really poorly for me, haha! I don’t think my score has ever been this low. If you’d like to learn more about this game, we’ve posted about it on our Instagram a few months ago.

On Thursday, it was co-op night! We played Quirky Circuits and Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze. You can never go wrong with Quirky Circuits and that was, like always, a lot of fun. We never seem to get passed the Roomba levels though because we keep introducing it to new people and start at the beginning every time, haha!
As I said, we also played Unmatched Tales to Amaze and this was the first time we played it with more than two players. While with two players it’s quite a quick game it was a lot longer with four players! That’s good to know for future plays because we’ll need those – we got wiped out hard by the Moth Man and his fellow baddies…

Friday night we played three games of Challengers! and we ended the night with a game of Quibbles. Challengers is an interesting game and we feel the need to try this with eight players now… I personally wouldn’t call it a great game but it’s definitely a fun and silly experience so I’m sure we’ll be playing this more often in the future.

This weekend we also did some gardening, although, I’d call it a garden renovation since we’ve mostly been digging up and cutting away large tree trunks from a willow that has recently been chopped down, and because that wasn’t heavy enough we also picked up around 500 kilos of rocks. So, with the landscaping now done, we can finally start doing things with plants, hurray!