You start thinking: how will I get anything done with so few actions? But during the game, you’ll quickly realize there are actions to be found in actions! Tableau-building games also tend to start slow at the beginning of the game and slowly build their way up to almost a puzzling number of chained actions! Other games that really do this are the deckbuilding classic Star Realms and also games like It’s a Wonderful World and Steampunk Rally! 

First, we’d like to say thanks for all the kind and supportive messages we’ve received, it was really lovely. It’s been a really hard week and it’s been weirdly silent in our house but we also know that we’ll slowly get used to it and that the grief will change into memories that’ll give a smile. Death is a part of life but it hurts, so we weren’t really in the mood for games last week.

We did play some small fillers and one game of Joyride Duel: Next Gen – but that was it, nothing to fill a blog post with. The week before that, however, we played a few very interesting titles that I didn’t discuss last week… so I’ll do that this week! The Weekly Recap video included in this post was from October 14th-20th and not last week (you might understand why we skipped last week’s Weekly Recap).

The weirdest game we played definitely was The City of Six Moons. It’s a game ‘discovered’ by Amabel Holland. It’s a game in which you’ll have to figure out what the game is. You get a box with components, cards, a board, tokens, and a rulebook but the twist is that there is no text in the rulebook (except an introduction telling that this game is from an alien civilization) – the rulebook solely has icons in it. Technically it’s a solo game but we’ve started to dig into it with four players and that worked well for us. We spent about two hours trying to decipher things and got quite far! After that, we felt a little stuck, wrote down our idea of how some parts of the game work, and left it there for next time. All of us are experienced board game players and it was interesting how everybody managed to identify different parts of the ‘puzzle’. It’s an interesting concept but the fact that there is no ‘solution’ to be found, might be frustrating for some people and that’s something to keep in mind if you ever want to give this a go. 🙂

We ended that evening on a lighter note and played a scenario of Big Potato’s choose-your-own-adventure-with-dexterity-elements game What Next? It’s such a silly fun concept! You draw location cards that tell a story and based on your decision and dangers you come across, you’re presented with challenges. These mini-games (over sixty different ones) range from knocking things (like cards for example) over with the items in the box, to blindly grabbing the right shape piece from a bag to solving small puzzles and many more we haven’t encountered yet. Most of these are timed or you only have a limited number of tries. This adds a fun and hectic element to the game and there’s also… the Tower of Peril. Each time you do something dangerous, you have to add one of the pieces to the tower. If the tower collapses at any point, you and the other players have lost the scenario. We enjoy the quirky storytelling and the lovely art and it takes only about an hour to play. Since we just played a dexterity game, we ended that night with a game of Viking See-Saw to keep that same energy going.

That weekend, we also played two games of Flatiron, the newest game by Ludonova that was designed by Llama Dice which you might know from another quite popular game called The White Castle. There was quite a buzz about this game before/at Spiel so we bought it on a whim without playing any demo. Flatiron is a tight two-player game! Just like in The White Castle, you have a limited number of actions, but that number will expand when you start adding action cards to your columns that you’ll activate during your game. You’ll have to accept that you won’t always be able to take the action you want because you can’t visit the same location twice and it might be blocked by the other player. During my first game I found this quite frustrating but having accepted it, our second play went a lot smoother. 😉

This week, we’ve got three game nights/days planned and we’ve got some interesting ones planned… Arcs and Dune: Imperium Uprising! We’ll tell you about it next week!