First of all, we really enjoy Agricola! It was the first ‘serious’ board game we ever bought together as a couple, and that makes it part of our Semi Co-op origin story. There was a Kickstarter for a new fancy special Agricola edition. We enjoy our cool, janky older version of the game, and a friend of ours actually has the 15th anniversary edition and has collected all the card decks over the years, so we have absolutely no need for a new Agricola in our lives – so this one is not for us. And besides, we’re not very enthusiastic that artificial intelligence was used for generating the art. I’m sure people still worked on the art, but this feels like a cheap shortcut, and soon games will start looking the same, and that’s just a shame. Oh, hey, on the bright side… if you wanted to try Agricola one day – I’m sure a lot of cheap 2nd-hand copies will be available once this new version is out in the world!

So, about this week! We, uhm, only played one game. It was a busy week, and we only had two evenings free for games and we were too tired on the first one. So we only played Middara. In the game, we have advanced to the next chapter, and that really increased the difficulty level! I think that at least one of our characters was defeated in every scenario since we did. Also, the curiosity of our friend to check out everything shiny has not been rewarded in these past scenarios, and it has been frustrating for him. So from now on, we might not take the ‘completionists’ road anymore and maybe just rush to the ending from time to time when things go sour. It’s a bit more about survival than exploration at this point.

We also resleeved our copy of Clank!. We sleeved the cards in penny sleeves many many years ago, but the sleeves were too big for the cards and had become kinda sticky and icky. We really like the KMC card barrier sleeves, which are actually meant as inner sleeves for people who like to double-sleeve? As a result, these sleeves are sturdy, but also thin, and have a really snug fit with standard cards! If we sleeve games, it’s with these.

This weekend, we were off to a music festival in another part of the country to see The Prodigy live! It was a really nice birthday gift from Heinze, and the following day, we spent most of the day in the city of Tilburg. Board game nerds that we are, we of course check if they had a game store, and they did: Labyrinth! It was a really impressive store: it was spacious, and their selection of games was top-notch! There were some real surprises there. Heinze came across a copy of Irish Gauge and we took that home since we have a lot of friends who like that style of games and it’s mighty handy to have one that only takes about an hour to play. Also, it’s a game on which two people we really like worked on: Amabel Holland and Ian O’Toole!

This week, we’ll make up for last week’s lack of games. We have planned multiple game nights, and Heinze even has another game of Defence of Procyon III in his schedule. Curious how it’ll go this time!