Forbidden Games was kind enough to give us a copy of Raccoon Tycoon last year at Spiel and we love how it’s a market manipulation game without being very heavy. While the game isn’t perfect it is a lot of fun guessing how much money everyone has and if the auction they’re running is nothing but a bluff.

This week, we managed to get three games to the table! We had our gathering of the small council in The King’s Dilemma, which ended up being the shortest game we’ve ever played… The king abdicated within twenty minutes after we had started the game, whoops! It was a weird combination of cards that resulted in that but it also resulted in a tied win between Rachel and me! This is not only very sweet but also very needed, as we are both trailing behind in ‘Prestige’, one of the two long-term victory points in the game. We’re sure we’re getting close to the end of the campaign but the group wants to keep the weekly game night going and we’re looking for some good five or six-player games to fulfill the upcoming empty spot in the middle of the table.

We also played Sniper Elite which even with two is a wonderfully tense cat-and-mouse game between the sniper and the German soldier hunting them. Rachel pulled off quite an impressive false trail at the start of the game but couldn’t get away once she had to reveal herself after reaching her first objective. The rules are easy to understand and the sniper’s shooting mechanic is wonderful. To make a shot, you pull any number of tokens from the bag, to score a hit you have to draw aim tokens equal to the distance you shot +1. If you draw more tokens, chances increase that you draw noise tokens which will give away your position. So it’s a nice balance of risk and reward, that also allows the German player to deduce the kind of shot the sniper is performing.

We also played 300:Earth and Water which is a short card-driven war game that plays in 40-60 minutes. It’s pretty impressive how much historical events and asymmetry is present in such a short game but because the cards can be very powerful, we feel it will take a couple of plays before we really know what is possible and what makes for a good strategy. It is very nice to have a shorter war game that can hit the table more often and can be used to introduce some friends to the genre.