Last week we finished watching The Queen’s Gambit and I absolutely adored the TV series! I mean, I almost wanted to play chess again, until I thought about that for a minute and remembered how incredibly difficult the game is. So my thoughts immediately went to my favorite mini chess game: HIVE! Our go-to travel game and one of our most played games ever.

We didn’t play as many games as the week before, it was Heinze’s birthday and we were both kinda busy. We did play Samoa and Sonora, finishing all the new unplayed games we had received these past weeks! The day after we played the last game a new package with three new games arrived though, so our feeling of victory didn’t last very long.

But first, Sonora*! Our very first flick-and-write game! The game has a very interesting concept but is a little bit heavier than most roll-and-writes we know. That being said, we hardly play roll-and-writes/flip-and-writes and we can imagine this is awesome if you play a lot of smaller games in the genre. My biggest problem was that I kept combo-ing things in the different regions of the player board and at one point would lose track of what I was doing. I’m sure that gets better if we play it more often though! 🙂

Samoa* is a fun little card game that reminded us of 6Nimmt, only with a hidden role mechanism. In this game, each player is one of the masks in the middle of the table and they want to score the most points, but other players can’t know which mask is yours (if they all guess which one is yours, you get ZERO points!) so you have to be careful. We enjoyed our play, but we do think this game would be better with more than two players.

The multiplayer expansion Prime Time we bought for Aristeia!* was also delivered, so we played that again! It was fun and a game we want to start playing more regularly so we can also start playing with other teams than the “demo” teams.

The package that was delivered contained three new amazing looking games from Osprey Games: Merv, The King is Dead and Village Green. On Friday, we played The King is Dead* with three players and that game is intense! You only get eight moves in this game, so almost everything you do matters. If you’d like to read our first impression/mini-review, we wrote about it on our Instagram account.

We also played a game of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, well, the app version. We’ve played that many many times in the past and we felt like playing it again -it’s still good! 🙂  And the biggest surprise of the week was Minecraft: Builders & Biomes. We played a game with our nephews of seven and nine years old and the game was actually quite fun to play?! We did not have the highest of expectations, but it’s a solid game! It has some smart game mechanics and manages to transfer the atmosphere of Minecraft. I think our nephews will be playing this a lot!

*These games were generously gifted to us by the publishers, thank you so much! 🙂