We couldn’t help ourselves after seeing the new CGE logo and this comic had to get out of our system. 😉 I like the logo though, it’s playful and makes it a little less corporate and the Galaxy Trucker character is versatile and can easily adjusted if they’d like funny custom logos.

Speaking of CGE, they’re releasing SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Spiel next week and we’re looking forward to it. We love a good sci-fi/space game and this one ticks a lot of our boxes. We’re unfamiliar with the designer Tomáš Holek but liked what we saw of the prototype at UKGE earlier this year.

Let’s return to last week. Now that Descent is finished, we’ve ‘officially started’ our Middara campaign and kicked it off by creating our characters and a shopping session (we did the tutorial a few months ago). So, ok, technically, we’ve not really started yet but from now on we’ll be playing it once every two weeks… for as long as we like it! We’ve had a good track record with completing Gloomhaven and Descent, so we’ll see if Middara can live up to those two.

We also played our first team game of Undaunted Callisto, which was really different from a two-player game! I personally might prefer it with just two players, but maybe it’s too soon to say that after playing just one four-player game.

And we played another Osprey Games’ game! One that we’ve been really looking forward to and that’s War Story: Occupied France. I would describe the game as a tactical choose-your-own-adventure game. It was interesting that no one at the table felt any connection to the characters we were using for this first mission. They almost felt more like assets to us. We first wondered if that somehow lessened the experience, but it really didn’t. The story was exciting and immersive and there was a very interesting balance between skill checks, puzzle-solving, and tactical decisions. At the end of our first game, however, we did realize the value of our ‘assets’ and that our agents were in fact quite squishy, meaning losing any one of them makes our future missions more difficult (we did lose one…). We were all equally impressed and are looking forward to the second mission.

Another new game we played is Tower Up, a game by Monolith Games. It’s a short lighter city-building game that takes about 45 minutes. There’s more to this game than meets the eye and we’d like to try it with three or four players to see how that changes the puzzle. The tricky part of the game is that in your turn, you can either pick a resource card or you can start a new building on the board. Whenever you place a building and it’s adjacent to any other building, you have to ‘pay the costs’, which means you have to stack another block on top of the neighboring building in the same color as those buildings. After that, you can place a roof on one of the buildings you’ve just added a block to. Just one of them. We quickly realized that once a building is completely surrounded, you can never place a roof on that building again!

This week it’s time for Spiel. Four (and a half) crazy days of masses of people and more board games being released than we’ll ever play. It’s going to be interesting! We don’t have many games on our “MUST-SEE” list this year so we’re going to let ourselves be surprised and see what we come across in the halls.

In case you missed it, we published an extra comic last week about Deep Print Games’ Roaring 20s!