Heinze’s favorite color in board games is yellow, it’s often the brightest and thus best seen if you’re colorblind (besides black and white of course). And speaking of yellow… we bought our very first car last week and it’s yellow (you can see it at the end of the recap video)! It might sound strange to people that this would be our first car, but we have managed well without one for the last fifteen-plus years. We live in a bigger city with okay train connections and shared vehicles, which combined with most of our friends and other activities that are quite close by made it very doable! But times are changing, public transport is getting more and more expensive and less reliable and circumstances need us to go to certain places more often. Besides the practical aspect, we both really enjoy driving so we’re also excited about the spontaneous freedom it offers. But enough about our giddy first-car enthusiasm! We also played some games this week.

We hadn’t played Calico in a few years and we were totally up for a ‘cozy’ game, once again falling for its cute looks only to discover it’s a very mean puzzle game. I do appreciate the game design, even though I ruthlessly failed to score two of my three design goals because of unlucky tile draws…

We also played our first game of Battalion: War of the Ancients. We only played the recommended ‘first game’ setup and the game and might need to try it again. The game has an interesting mechanism with order tokens you get to spend to take different actions with your units or you can lose them when your units are taking hits in battle. Once all of your tokens are used up (this could take multiple rounds), you need to rally to retrieve order tokens and draw a card from your tactic deck. Once your deck runs out of cards you’ve lost the game! We made the mistake of not sacrificing any units to prevent losing order tokens at the beginning of the game. Because we didn’t do that, the game felt really restricting and that’s not a thing I enjoy very much. But then again, I’m also not the biggest fan of sacrificing things right from the start so I might have to admit it’s just not a game for me. Heinze did find it very interesting and I’m sure some of our friends might also enjoy it. 🙂 You can play this light war game with two or four players (then it becomes a team game) and it takes around 30-45 minutes.

On Friday we played the game I’ve been excited about ever since we picked it up at SPIEL – Gibberers: The Word Game of Language Invention and Civilization Development! In this co-op game, you develop your own language and it’s fantastic. During the first phase of the game, you build your language with eighteen words. A few are mandatory like yes, no, I, and know – the rest is up to you! After you’ve done that, you’re going to practice using your new language by introducing yourselves. Then, you continue to the game part of Gibberers. One player (the mentor) draws a card and has five English words from which they can pick one. The mentor will have to think up how it would translate to the new language and write that down (without revealing the English meaning). Then, the mentor has to describe the meaning of this new word to the rest of the group (the students)… only using the new language! The students can also only communicate in the new language at this point so the game becomes hilarious. There are mechanisms for the students to ask for hints and the mentor can add one supporting word. During the three phases, the words will become more complex but you’ll also add more words to your vocabulary. Our group really enjoyed the game and we had a great time and it is surprising how well it went. We didn’t win the game because we thought the mentor meant ‘voice’ instead of ‘speech’ in the last round but it was darn close. Since the game is not available anywhere at the moment, we’re really hoping this will be picked up by a publisher that can distribute it in Europe and the US. Because we would love this jewel of a game to be available to a larger audience.

This weekend, we played a few smaller games. The cute little dice game Sausage Sizzle!, the deceivingly tiny box drafting tableau-building game Moving Wild (which requires a really big table), and Splendor Duel. We’ll see what this week will bring us, we have at least one game night planned that we’re looking forward to.