Pfew, it’s been a busy week with lots of cool things!

The biggest thing probably was Heinze’s going-away party at his old job, he and a friend/colleague came up with the fun idea of organizing a Klask! tournament. Since it was organized in the university’s TV studio, they added some dramatic lighting so the whole thing looked impressive. With Klask! being such a simple and accessible game, it was a perfect combination of excitement and fun.

It was also the week of my birthday and although I didn’t celebrate it with a party, our game night on Friday turned into a fun early birthday celebration night with cake and lighter (party) games. The biggest hit was one of the latest titles of Wise Wizard Games’  alternative label “Wacky Wizard Games”… Caution Signs! It’s a game in which players get 20 seconds to draw a combination of two words on a caution-sign-shaped board. The cards with these words are then shuffled face down in a pile with four random other cards and these are handed over to the ‘guesser’ of that round. They’ll then have to combine the right words with the drawings! Normally, there’s a slight hesitation with people when they have to draw things, but 20 seconds is too short for anybody to draw something good, and people like me, who draw a lot, maybe even have a harder time because you can’t draw something good-looking.

That night, we also played a game of Mantis, The Resistance, Flip Over Frogs, and Miss Match. We learned a few things that night, including that we think Flip Over Frogs is more fun with two players we found the rules of Miss Match a bit too loose leaving too much space for interpretation of whether an answer was correct or not. That and word association games are hard for some people (including me), so that game was a little bit of a mismatch (sorry) for us.

Earlier that week we also received a copy of Distilled, a game we heard a lot of buzz about so we were eager to try it out. At first, we found it tricky but after finishing our first game – we have to admit it’s not that complex and we could now easily introduce this to new players and the playtime of 30 minutes per player feels correct once you know the rules. The theme and the ‘feel’ of the game really reminded us of the game Chai, a game about making and selling tea only Distilled’s complexity is higher. Although we enjoy the tea theme better, Distilled better fits our level of gaming.

This week is going to be busy with finishing a big project on my side but hopefully, we’ll manage to squeeze in some board games. Fingers crossed!