Valentine’s Day, eh, we just tell each other we love them every day, so that’s enough, right?…

This week we had a week filled with gaming, there were so many games, we experimented with a little Semi Co-op recap reel which you can see at the top of this post! (We’ve been looking for a suitable video format and we really liked making this one, so let us know if you want to see it more often btw!)

The week started with the arrival of ArcheOlogic, a deduction puzzle game by one of the designers of 2023 Golden Standee winner Turing Machine. We’ve played three games so far and while the questions you can ask the “machine” aren’t as complex, the puzzles it presents are just as fiendishly tricky as with Turing Machine. After our first ‘normal’ game, we naively tried the challenge mode and we were very surprised when the form of the starting hints completely changed and doubled the playing time for us. Having played this a few times, we are convinced that this game might be more accessible to more people than Turing Machine. The game is more visual and the questions you can ask “the machine” are much more clear and don’t leave any room for different interpretations, while the questions of Turing Machine require a certain way of thinking.

On Friday, I played my third game of Warhammer 40k and lost for the third time in a row. My Orks really seem to struggle against my Death Guard opponent but me and my opponent are now both tinkering with Ork army compositions to see how I can get on an equal footing. While the games are a little long for my taste, I’m really surprised how important constructing and playing an army is almost like something like Netrunner or Magic: The Gathering. Just rolling up to a game with a grab bag of units without knowing how you need to approach the situation, clearly is not the way to go.

After that, we went over the a friend’s house to play some Cosmic Encounter. While we hadn’t played the game since 2016 and mostly remembered hearing that we didn’t play in it in the right mindset (we were way too friendly/helpful), we had a great time getting reintroduced to it. Rachel grabbed the victory in a very showy way by using a force field to boot the defender allies (and her own!), leaving everyone slightly in awe of her sneaky ways.

On Saturday, I played one of my gaming white whales: Feudum! It isn’t the most elegant of designs. Our rules-teach took almost as long as our three-hour playing time but it’s a very unique game with a lovely quirky identity. In Feudum you use pawns, which can be of different classes like farmers, nobles, knights, and monks, to travel the lands and conquer locations. At the same time, the actions also give you reputation in one of the six guilds, which come with their own actions, some of which you can only activate if you have the right position within that guild. Using the guilds is necessary to get the in-game economy going and give you access to more influence tokens, airships, and resources which you need to do more things with your pawns and the locations you rule over. Because both parts are very dependent on other player’s actions, it becomes a very interactive and economic game, which also allows you to tame monsters and attack other players. The new version of Feudum is about to go live on Gamefound and this how-to-play video is very good, so if you are interested in the game, that might not be perfect but is very much a labor of love from the designer, you might want to give Feudum a chance.

This week we don’t have a lot of gaming plans except for a game of Starship Captains. So maybe we could make some time for a romantic game night…