Ah, the infamous Begging cards in Agricola, they do really strike fear into players! At least, they do with me. So much that I know I never had to take one and then I realized that I don’t remember anybody we ever played the game with ever has taken a Begging card! Somehow you’ll always try to find a way to scramble enough food tokens together, even if it is by sacrificing some of your dear animals (RIP, Timmy).

Newer games seem less harsh if it comes to such punishments! And, in some games, it can even be part of a strategy to not withdraw from requested payment. Examples are Northgard: Uncharted Lands and Kutná Hora: The City of Silver. In Northguard it’s sometimes beneficial that you have to remove a unit from the board if you can’t pay for its upkeep (if you’d like to spawn that unit somewhere else on the board for example) – you do have to take an unrest card which will give you negative points, but at least there’s a strategic element involved. In Kutná Hora you often lose reputation points when not paying taxes – but some strategies strive from having a bad reputation! You’ll definitely need that money to grab points in the ‘dark’ side of the game to offset the points you’ll be losing for ending up without any reputation but hey… there are possibilities!

So, let’s talk about this week. There’s no weekly recap video because… we had no content for the video! Heinze was away for work most of the week and we had somebody staying over at our house and the schedule was filled up with non-gaming things. However, we did play one game this weekend! We finally tackled one of the new murder investigation games by Iello that they sent us a while ago. The series is called Guilty and we played Guilty: Houston 2015. The 18+ on the box already hinted at it, but the story was truly dark and gritty and took place in a prison – we liked it.

There are multiple things we really liked. The layout of the game (a main board with room for location cards and for every character) makes it feel organized. The story is layered and you get presented with LOADS of information, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

What we liked most was the passage of time. During the game, after you examine something or question a suspect, time progresses and you flip a card from the time deck. Anything could happen, from text messages to one of your colleagues finding a new lead for you to follow to bigger things. This really made the game immersive for us. The play time on the box says three to four hours, but we took it slow and it took us about five hours to solve the case. We completely misinterpreted one detail and that led to us making a very very faulty conclusion but we somehow did end up with the best possible ending (hurray?!).

Oh and to compensate for the missing video this week, we’ll be posting a recap video every day while we are at SPIEL next week. And in case you missed it, we posted an extra comic last week about the game Civolution!