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Een bericht gedeeld door Semi Co-op (@semicoop)

While rules lawyer is a term used among board gamers to describe people who are very strict on rules, we realized we never heard of a rules judge. So our minds started thinking about what rules judges might look like and somehow we ended with this comic. It’s a bit of a strange one but we like to indulge ourselves a little sometimes, plus we get to see the Death character again!

Last week has been pretty slow, while we both recovered from actual illness symptoms of Covid last Monday, our energy levels remain very low so we’re taking it very easy and have begun exploring all the cool Spiel releases we took back home plus some of the games in the Funbrick series we hadn’t gotten around to yet. So let’s go through them chronologically.

On Tuesday we played some more Turing Machine, which we talked about last week, and we played our first game of Wormholes. Wormholes is a nice pick-up-and-deliver game in space about making routes using wormholes. It’s a very clever and interesting puzzle that is made a bit more exciting because of space-based features like black holes and nebulas. It’s quick to play with logical rules and we think the sweet spot for us is probably with three to four players with a nice amount of the expert tiles thrown in.

On Wednesday we played Gosu X which is a very cool two-player card battling game. It has hints of Magic the Gathering while focusing a lot more on building your army/tableau than on the actual battles. The game is a best-of-three-battles affair in which you have all the time to build up an army of demons, magical creatures, and heroes called immortals until one of the players passes. At that point, the other player gets three more rounds to finish their affairs and a battle takes place in which you check which of the two forces has a higher combat strength. So the game is all about making your forces as strong as possible while hindering the other player by capturing and destroying their cards. At the same time, there are several different alternate win conditions you need to keep an eye on and some of the draftable factions even come with their own victory condition. This game has a lot of depth while games typically last between 30-45 minutes, so this is definitely up our alley. We’ll be playing this a lot!

On Thursday we played Tidal Waves: Banner Festival which is a Trick-Taking/Racing/Area Control game(?). It’s unlike anything we’ve played so far, except maybe Brian Boru, and while it didn’t really come alive with two players, we’re looking forward to trying it with three or four players. A game only takes thirty minutes and the illustrations are beautiful, so if you’re looking for something unique while looking attractive enough to convince some friends to try it, you might want to research this one. 😉

On Friday we played Starship Captains which is a wonderful medium-weight Star Trek-inspired optimization game. It’s lighter than Lost Ruins of Arnak but it’s chasing that perfect usage of resources high just like Arnak. It’s a beautiful production and rules-wise very logical, so we think this game is a very good game to get Star Trek fans into trying some modern board game. As for ourselves, we need (and want) to play it again soon because the score difference was half a point, time for a rematch!

On Saturday we played some games from the Funbrick series and we wrote a long overview of them on our Instagram, so we won’t repeat it all here. They’re all very fun and short party/pub games in a lovely format that all bring something unique to your collection. Our favorite is Viking See-saw, a game about putting your cargo on a see-saw ship as its rules are simple and the different weights and shapes of your cargo really turn it into a very fun chaotic mess. These games are coming to Kickstarter tomorrow if you’re interested.

On Sunday we played Northgard: Uncharted Lands which is a deckbuilding 4X game. While we’re not the biggest fans of direct conflict on a map, this game has a lot of other things going on like exploring, tactical formation of regions, deck building and even NPC monsters you need to keep in check. While our first game was a bit cautious and pacifist we did start to see some interesting depth emerge when it comes to attacking, forming your regions, and spreading your forces around to gain VP. It’s always a good sign when we keep talking about the game a few hours later and this one kept our minds busy for quite some time after the game ended. So we’ll keep you posted on our further experiences.

So that’s a lot of games and we’re not even halfway trying out all the Spiel games, plus we want to play all of these some more! So I’ll guess this is a good point to end this blog post and start playing some more games… 😉

What game do you know so well you could be a rules judge?

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