Sorry, this really was one of the first remarks at our table during the rule explanation of Escape Plan. Guns are maybe one of the biggest cultural differences between the US and living in Europe. Since it’s way less likely for people to be armed with a firearm, police rarely draw their weapons here, unless they are dealing with serious criminals. 🙂 I’m not going to discuss the whole weapon issue here, so we’re going to continue to cardboard entertainment!

Our week started with Middara! And it really was an interesting scenario that did creative things with tokens across the board. The rules of Middara can sometimes be a little fiddly, so we might have made a mistake or two (again!). But in this kind of game, we’re more about having fun than worrying too much about perfect rule execution. If we discovered we made a mistake, we’re not going to replay that scenario – not in a game that has at least 45+ scenarios to play through. Our little mistake aside, we like this side of Middara! It was a bit of a shame my character’s health got tethered to the enemies’ health, meaning Zeke was defeated very early in the game after damaging the baddie. BUT, luckily, we play with four characters with the three of us because it allows other people to join a game if they like, plus we thought it would be handy to have a backup car like in Top Gear. 😛 That has been a good choice – it’s happened more than once that one of our characters got wiped from the board. Enemies can hit hard if the dice are in their favor!

Our cozy game of the week was Forest Shuffle. We now play it with both available expansions, but I wonder if it improves the game? It did a great job in balancing out certain strategies, but it does make the game a little bit more cluttered with all the extra icons. We know that there’s an app (Android/Apple) that can supposedly count the score for you, but we haven’t really used that yet because the reflection of the light makes it really hard to scan the cards. I’m a sucker for these kind of games and will probably not be able to resist the upcoming expansion either. And speaking of nature-themed games, I saw this Kickstarter campaign of Rewild: South America, and it looks lovely/intriguing – I’ll try to figure out if the game would be a good fit for us.

And that was my last board game of the week. Heinze, however, had another two game days planned! He played Kill Team and 1830: Railways & Robber Barons. Since it’s silly for me to write about his experiences, I’ve asked him to share them with us:

Kill Team was a lot of fun, I still haven’t won, but I tied this time! Since we’re playing Space Marines against Death Guard, our kill counts seem to increase similarly, which is something I’m curious if you can escape in this matchup. But we’re getting faster, the games are exciting, and I’m starting to think I’m beginning to get a feel for how to play the positioning game a bit more.

Saturday, I played 1830 and while I still enjoy 18XX, but with five or six players, 1830 takes a bit too long for me. We played for six hours, and when you already know you’re not in a great position, the last operating rounds can drag a bit. I also felt my brain was completely fried, which isn’t ideal when you’re also the bank… That being said, I really want to play 1889 or 18Chesapeake soon again because there is just a nice rhythm to these games and by now I have enough grip on its flow that I really enjoy dumpling companies or seeing clever creative opportunities.

This week, we’ve got nothing definite planned yet, but I’m sure we’ll get some games to the table.