We’ve had a copy of Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River for months now and ever since we played it, we’ve had this idea for a comic. We’ve held on to it until it was finally released, which is… now! Well, tomorrow to be precise. If we would describe Katmai to a fellow board gamer, we’d say it’s a combination of Air, Land and Sea and Cascadia. You’ve got the lane battling element of Air, Land and Sea and the scoring of Cascadia and that makes for an interesting two-player game that’s quick to play. The player’s decks are cards with beautiful art of the bears from the Katmai National Park and Preserve made by Tom Lopez. We can recommend it if any of this sounds good to you!

Aight, last week everything went a little differently than expected. First, on Monday, Heinze felt ill but I did feel like playing a game and not like staring at a screen like the TV some more – so I did something I hardly ever do and grabbed a game from the shelf to play solo! The Guild of Merchant Explorers fitted my mood perfectly and… it basically plays the same as it would playing with more players so it’s very much a solitaire puzzle game.

In the meantime, Heinze miraculously recovered after one night and I got sick on Wednesday, booh! So, on Friday I couldn’t join our game night of Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies, which was a shame but I was told that everybody had a lot of fun! In this RPG, players create an isolated community and everybody plays a character within that community. Then, you get three cards with words you need to think of in the dialect of your game. In their game, the word for future was ‘wharf’ and the word for death was ‘salt’. I think you can guess that their setting wasn’t in a desert. 😉 During the game you also play out scenes with characters and thus create a dialect and a setting during the game. It really does sound like fun and reminds me of Microscope a little with a language element.

On Sunday I was feeling well enough to join our friends for an afternoon of miniature painting and modding Hotwheels cars. Originally, we did this for Gaslands (and just because it’s fun) but ever since we got the game Joyride, we kinda left Gaslands behind. Luckily, the grid of Joyride takes the size of Hotwheels cars into account so we’re now all building custom cars for Joyride (with the fitting extreme color palettes) and we’ll mount them on a two-hex base so we can easily use them in the game.

We also played a game of Century Golem Edition (still the best Century game!) and Sky Team this week, my head wasn’t up for something more challenging. We’ll see what this week will bring! Hopefully a full recovery and maybe some more games…?