We are slowly creeping towards the end of the year and that means that the festive and gift-giving season is upon us again. We used to make gift guides for CoolStuffInc.com in the past and that always was a lot of fun to do. Making a list that piques curiosity while also having titles on there that appeal to new and seasoned gamers is quite the challenge! … and mostly the following challenge then was to find titles that were available. That won’t be any different this year due to the shipping crisis, but luckily there are loads and loads of amazing board games. 🙂 Who knows, if we’re feeling up to it, we might still do a gift guide on our Twitter account and if we do, we’ll also link to it in a future blog post here so you won’t miss it.

This week, we haven’t had a lot of time and energy for gaming and so we only played three games. Le gasp! First up, we tried the newest edition of Galaxy Trucker. We played it with a friend who owns the original version of the game and I believe that everyone’s first response always is that the cover is way better than the original. 😀 The game itself hasn’t changed that much, this version comes with several shorter variants and also the more old-school variant in which you play three rounds. We did find the rulebook quite… um, lacking if you just quickly want to look up things. It’s formatted for people who haven’t played the game before and it tries to guide new players through the game like a tutorial. If you skip the tutorial and want to dive straight into the game, there’s no structural logic to be found. Luckily, the game itself is not that complicated, so we don’t think we’ll need to look a lot of things up in the future. Or we’ll just download the rulebook and use the search certain keywords up in the PDF. 😉 The game is rather brutal if your ship has an issue at the beginning of the last round, during our game the last player had 27 points, while the other two players got 92 and 105 points. Nonetheless, it was chaotic fun and certainly something that we’ll play more often!

We also played another game of Oltréé with two friends. Since they never played the game and we didn’t want to influence their choices too much, the game quickly beat us. In our previous plays, we always went with the “always be closing” approach that we also take with portals in Eldritch Horror, so in Oltréé if there is a problematic region, that’s first priority! During this play, however, the other players wanted to invest in buildings early in the game and leave some risk on the board. Aaaaand, that apparently doesn’t work so well, lesson learned!

Yesterday evening we ended up playing a game of Azul. And it turns out that the last time we had played Azul was April 2020. I honestly can’t believe it had been that long! Time is so weird.