This comic is a terrible in-joke and only funny for people who have played the game Heavy Rain (2010)… sorry. I just couldn’t resist and had to get this out of my system ever since we learned that the new expansion for HEAT would be called Heavy Rain.

Since Heinze is a teacher, he always has the first week of the year off and I decided to ‘join’ him and that meant, like the week before, that we had a lot of time for games! Having had this much time for ourselves has been a blessing and we really enjoyed a week without any festivities or other obligations.

So, what did we play? Well, first off we finally had a date for playing Nucleum. It was a beast to learn and it took Heinze and me about two hours to go through the entire rulebook to understand the game and it took about an hour to teach it to our friends the next day. But, wow, it was worth it – what a great game. It took us, as all first-timers, about five hours to play. We’re sure we can shave off a chunk of time the next time we play but it’ll still take an entire afternoon. We’ve also decided we’re just going to play it with the four of us from now on because we all know the rules now and we don’t want to teach it to other people. 😉 Luckily, our friends really liked it as well. You can read our full first impression here on Instagram.

We also received a game that we’ve been really excited about and that it is… Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City! It’s officially called an expansion but you can also play it as a stand-alone version, which is perfect since we had never played Tokyo Highway before. It’s one of those games we’ve stared at a lot and have always been fascinated by and when Itten Games contacted us if we were interested in a copy because they’d like to get the word out about its upcoming Kickstarter. So far, we’ve played it with two and with four players. It was fun with just the two of us, but it was hilarious with four players and just pure chaos. It also comes with “Mission Rules” which makes the game more interesting because the game isn’t just a race in which player places all of their cars the quickest (or lose if they run out of columns) but you score points based on different missions on the mission board like circling a building, have the highest column, have an exit on certain locations, etc etc. We think this will work for a lot of gamers. Once we’ve made a post on Instagram with some pictures, we’ll also share it here.

This weekend, we introduced Root to two of our boulder friends and because they were new to it and it had been quite a long time ago since we played it, we decided to stick to the base game. The Woodland Alliance won and I think that we all wouldn’t mind giving it another go. I forgot how light the game feels, with the emphasis on ‘feels’ because it is a complex game due to all the different rulesets per player and there are always a lot of specific situations that require clarification from the rulebook. But… turns don’t take long and the player boards are an excellent guide through every turn.

We also played our first game of Cat in the Box and that game might have instantly become my favorite trick-taking game. There are a lot of trick-taking games and I think some of them are great games, but in essence… they’re the same while Cat in the Box really is different in a fun way. You can read more about it here on our Instagram if you’re curious.

Earlier that week Heinze also played a game of Warhammer 40K and we played three games of a game we cannot talk about yet, so that’ll have to wait. 🙂