Happy New Year, may your workers never get blocked, and may your rules explanations go well! We had a lovely week celebrating the new year, meeting family, playing games, and… buying our very first car!

This comic is a sequel to last week’s comic about board game challenges. Personally, I love making everything an ‘event’, I can’t just watch a movie, I need to turn it into a marathon, and every game day I propose we turn it into a mini tournament. That’s why I love putting together challenges to pair up games or seek out games that offer something strange and unique, especially if it is hard to organize. Speaking of which, does anyone want to play This Discord Has Ghosts In It? We just need fifteen people and a Discord server… or maybe some Long time listener, last time caller? We just need a podcast studio and some people calling in.

Although we didn’t play anything that wild this week, we did play Rococo on New Year’s Eve, which meant we got to enjoy some actual fireworks after the fireworks in the game, which was a fun touch. It was our first play of Rococo and we enjoyed it as it was a game that has quite a bit of rules but the thematic focus of all the different parts make sense once you know the rules. It reminded us a lot of Distilled in that way and we think if you enjoy one of these games, you’ll also enjoy the other.

We also played some more Trio, which is still a blast, and some Cat Lady while slowly waking up on January 1st, which is the perfect chill game for that situation. We also tried a four-player game of A Fake Artist Goes to New York, only to realize it doesn’t really work and the game tried to warn us by putting a minimum of five players on the box… 😅

We played three more runs of Dead Cells and defeated the first boss! The options that were presented to us after defeating the boss are a nice step up in complexity but the game also gives an incentive to replay the first biomes of the game to unlock cards from a “deck of secrets”. It’s really interesting to see a game designed around quick-playing rounds to get you to the serotonin-inducing phase of unlocking extra stuff at the end of the game and I suspect more campaign games might adapt to this format in the future as it doesn’t make you feel forced to finish a campaign, or even play it with the same group, but just enjoy a game and know at the end that it will be slightly more expanded next time.

Lastly, we played some Super Rhino Hero Battle with my six-year-old niece which was great! It’s funny to realize how much unconscious engineering knowledge adults apply when building giant skyscrapers out of cards, when you see a child build things in a way that’ll make your toes curl. Somehow the contraption survived a long time every game and she got to experience the wonder when looking at the giant structures that you’ll end up with near the end of the game.

That was all for this week. Gaming wise we have no concrete plans yet but I can tell you next week we’ll make fun of something else in case you were starting to get annoyed about the administrative nerdy side of an already nerdy hobby. 😉