It seems like gaming cons are back on the menu with GenCon coming up in a week and SPIEL that has gotten a green light in October. Obviously, we’re not going to GenCon, living in Europe, but we are planning to visit SPIEL. We’ve got mixed feelings, on the one hand, we’re excited about the buzz and craziness of board gaming conventions, but on the other hand, we’re also wary because of… well, the state of the pandemic and the fact that numbers seem to be rising again now that’s summer is over. But we’re really happy that SPIEL has a mandatory mask-rule in combination with other safety measurements. At the moment we’re just trying to stay positive and hoping we get to meet a lot of people and roam the halls to encounter all different kinds of games. Time will tell!

Last week we’ve played two new games and we continued our Gloomhaven campaign. We’re still going strong, all of our current characters are max level and we think we have only a few more scenarios to go. And that’s fine after three and a half years of playing. We’ve enjoyed it, but we very much are looking forward to exploring other games.

And there are a lot of “other games”! Last week we played two new titles that we’ve been really curious about. We’ve played two games of Cascadia, one of the latest titles by Flatout Games. The game is illustrated by Beth Sobel, so no surprise that it looks gorgeous. The game feels like a variation of Calico, it surely is different, but there are overlapping game mechanics with puzzly tile laying and tons of ways to score points! You can either score points through the animal tokens or the landscape tiles. We do think Cascadia is a less tense game due to the fact that you’re not bound to a player board. Calico presents you with a crunchy puzzle with borders, while Cascadia is more forgiving on that front. You can play the game in about 45 – 60 minutes, so it’s an easy one to get to the table. We’d like to thank Alderac Entertainment Group for sending us a copy of the game!

We also received Kim-Joy’s Magic Bakery, a co-op card game for 2 – 5 players that is about… baking and serving customers! We have quite a few friends who love baking so we know this will be a hit. One of our friends with whom we played it last week, even turned out to be a great fan of Kim Joy and they told us that they were considering buying the game a few days prior to us getting it. We’ve played the first scenario that night and although it wasn’t really hard, we did have a fun time. The game has ten scenarios, so we do assume the difficulty will increase in every scenario but that’s something we will find out in the future. 😉 We’d like to thank Skybound entertainment for sending us a copy of the game!

Oh in case you missed it, and if you’re quick, you can still participate in our giveaway on Instagram, together with Cephalofair Games we’re giving away amazing prizes like a Frosthaven pledge. 😮 We’ll contact the winners tomorrow!