Player color preferences, I have them! Honestly, mine is mainly born out of necessity because I am colorblind, and yellow happens to be the easiest to recognize for me in the low light conditions in which a dining table primarily resides. This does cause some “trouble” with some friends who also prefer to play yellow but except for several occasions in which people accidentally move another player’s pieces, it hasn’t led to any conflicts… yet.

Speaking of player conflict we played a lot of new games this week, with several being quite good at making you hate the other players at the table. On Tuesday, we played Shamans, which is a hidden role trick-taking game that surprised us in many ways. We had briefly spotted Shamans at Spiel 2021 but Studio H had several other titles, like Oltréé and Suspects, which we decided looked more interesting at the time. While reading Dan Thurot‘s great article on trick-taking games in Senet #10 (which also happens to include an article by us!) we noticed he spoke quite highly of Shamans, so we decided it was time to take a look. The presentation of Shamans is lovely and mysterious but once you know how it works, it becomes easy to understand and it’s a lot of fun. If you can imagine playing the Crew while having that gleefully tense experience of a game of Werewolves, you know exactly how this is going to play out. People will be shouting they don’t have the right suit to follow, or people are suddenly raking in all sorts of tokens in secret, which might be used against you or maybe just be collected in hopes of getting some extra VPs at the end of the round. It’s great and we’re going to be introducing this to loads more people.

We also, after years of it being praised by Shut Up & Sitdown, played Skull and it instantly clicked with the group and we all loved it. It’s a bluffing game about trying to flip beer coasters, hoping you don’t flip one with a skull. The game looks lovely and the rules are super simple plus the highs and lows at the table are present every time someone starts the bidding to see how many coasters should be flipped. We highly recommend trying this game or getting some beer mats/coasters to make your own copy.

On Saturday a friend and I tried Age of Fantasy: Skrimish, which is a free skirmish miniature game by One Page Rules. One Page Rules has a number of free games that allow you to bring some miniatures to the tables for some quick and simple Warhammeresque battles on your favorite tabletop. We had a good time, and the miniatures and the table looked great, it isn’t the deepest game ever, so as a board gamer that likes tough decisions, you should probably look for something meatier. But if you’re just looking to introduce yourself or some friends to miniature-wargaming, or want something quick while having the mental capacity to talk about and enjoy some snacks, this would fit the bill. The game does offer mission cards and even a campaign mode which would add some more interesting choices in the process, so maybe we’ll try some of those options the next time we want to move some minis across a table.

This week we haven’t planned any games yet but our new store is keeping us busy as well as an upcoming exciting reveal in a rerelease of a game currently on Kickstarter! 😎 And in case you missed it, we published a commissioned comic last Thursday about the new Santorini co-op expansion!