Happy holidays everybody! We hope that you are able to spin this normally festive period into something that celebrates the people that surround you and help each other to make the world feel a little brighter. Because 2020 changed everything in our daily lives, including games we thought it would be fun to have a little Christmas Carol-inspired comic, which posed some problems when we got to the spirit of gaming future as we have no clue what gaming would look like in 2021. For inspiration, we grabbed our ongoing attempt to cull our gaming collection which ground to halt now the Netherlands has entered a new lockdown. We are healthy and safe and we hope you are too.

Because everything, except grocery stores, is closed at the moment we have decided to spend our holiday taking it a little slower and mostly focus a bit on small projects in the house and playing some of the games that we think haven’t gotten the attention this year they deserve. Because of all the limited opportunity to have social interaction in 2020 we also have a chance to beat our “games played in a year” record which right now sits at 330 games. We’ve played 319 games so far with eleven days to go, so we think we can beat that, especially if we play some shorter games like Abandon All Artichokes.

This week we played some of our favorites like Tiny Towns, Gloomhaven and Calico as well as some new ones like Village Green and Merv: Heart of the Silk Road. While Osprey publishes both they couldn’t be more different. Village Green is a very puzzly card game about creating the best village green for your village, because of the theme it reminds us a bit of Arboretum but it’s a bit quicker. We enjoyed our three plays but the yellow cards are very hard to read which we hope will be solved in a future printing. Merv on the other hand is a much heavier economic game about gaining power through trading and protecting the city from the Mongols. We’ve played it two times now and we’re definitely going to play it a few more times as it feels like we haven’t completely figured out what the best strategies are because of the small intricacies of how the different tracks interact with each other.

This week we’re going to try Cubitos and Chai, which just arrived from Alderac and Steeped Games and we excited about both. We know Cubitos’s cover has had a diverse reaction from the public but we freaking love it and it seems that the absurdism of the cover is continued in the box so that should be a good time. While Chai’s art isn’t absurd, it does look gorgeous, and the theme fits us very well as we have an ever-growing collection of fresh tea and even have a little tea menu to present to guests when they want to try something special.