Happy New Year! We hope you had a lovely New Year’s Eve and could play some games. We did three games of Flash Point: Fire Rescue because a friend found the Honor and Duty expansion which features two very tricky maps. The first one is a metro station, which was narrowly won on our first try but the Airplane map is a tough hard map that will beat you over the head with some serious structural damages and hard-to-reach POI. It’s a shame that, at least in the Netherlands, Flash Point: Fire Rescue seems to have been forgotten as it’s a really easy-to-play exciting co-op with a pretty unique theme. Hopefully, it will get a reprint or a new edition soon so more people can enjoy it again.

Speaking of being able to enjoy a certain game again. We lent out our copy of Forest Shuffle after only playing one game because we thought we didn’t have any time to play it but we missed it a lot more than we imagined we would…

Whoops! We aren’t the biggest fans of Terraforming Mars as it takes a bit too long but Forest Shuffle has that same open tableau-building feel in a much shorter period. In the game, you’re trying to build the most successful forest by planting trees and populating them with animals, birds, bats, insects, and plants. The animal and plant cards are divided into two sections, allowing you to either place an animal on the left or right side of the tree or cards that allow you to place birds at the top and plants (or insects, small animals, or amphibians) at the bottom. While this is a wonderful mechanism, it also leads to offering you a very high number of choices within the cards in your hand. Keeping track of all that information might require you to adapt this special technique shown in the comic of sorting the cards to keep track of all your choices. 😉

We also played quite a bit of Rollecate and Quibbles last week because after discovering Quibbles last week, we wanted to explore Michiel de Wit’s games some more. We don’t talk about Rollecate a lot but we think it’s a game that will take some time for you to ‘click’ as it has a unique blend of push your luck and negative scoring, that you can offset by collecting sets of the same number and that requires you to rewire your brain a bit. The American version is called Loose Caboose! btw if you’re interested in learning more about it.

Lastly, we played our second game of Critical: Sanctuary which is a lovely light RPG for people who like the idea of role-playing games but might not want to invest in four-hour D&D sessions and reading loads of text trying to create a character. While the box suggests every scenario only takes thirty minutes, our sessions seem to take about an hour, which is probably because we want to enjoy the characters by having silly voices and having some banter between everyone. It works for us! Rachel who GMs can prepare the session in fifteen minutes of skimming the rules and we can have a quick little adventure. Its setting has some jarring colonial adventure tropes like savage natives, so if that is not your thing you might want to steer clear of it or try Critical: Foundation, which has a cyberpunk setting using the same ruleset instead.

Tomorrow we’re trying Nucleum! So it’s time to end this blog post and dive into its rulebook to see how to play this literally and figuratively heavy beast of a game!