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

Sometimes you see an initiative you want to support, so you try to write a comic about it and end up with a joke not mentioning the actual thing…

So we would like to offer a formal apology to the Green Games Guide! We really enjoyed reading the guide and the inclusion of practical examples of publishers taking steps helped us as consumers see what to keep an eye out for when trying to be a little more environmentally conscious during our cardboard and plastic-filled playtimes. Just making board games more environmentally friendly won’t save the planet but we’re convinced we all have to critically examine everything in our life and make some drastic changes, to keep our planet habitable.

We’ll never say we’re the most conscious environmental gamers but we have been turned off by several games in the past that looked interesting but seemed very wasteful in its product design. Give us a game filled with well-designed standees or meeples and we’ll get way more excited about it than offering us heaps of plastic that will only appear on the table once or twice. We’ve also cut down on buying new games, although that’s also because we are in the very rare and fortunate position that publishers send us games.

This week, life decided to throw us quite a bit of curve balls our way, so we only played three games, which all happen to be older classics. Firstly, we revisited Seasons, It’s still a wonderful dueling wizards card game that was already featured in our fifth-ever comic. Rachel scored over three hundred points, leaving me in the dust which I can blame completely on me discarding the wrong card and Rachel using that card to create a super powerful card drawing engine… So I guess we’ll just have to play a revenge game soon.

Another oldie we played was Flash Point: Fire Rescue, which was featured in our third-ever comic! We played the submarine map, which is always very tricky. Even though we won on easy mode, it was a lot closer than we’d like to admit. We got very lucky because most of the POI we lost to the fire turned out to be empty tokens and we saved the engine room just in time to pull through.

Last, but certainly not least, we played Take 5/6Nimmt which is probably a high point in game design that most game designers can only dream to reach one day. It’s just a joyous frustrating experience and if you haven’t played it go find a copy or try it on BoardGameArena.

This week we’ll be returning to our Artisans of Splendent Vale campaign, which has been an enjoyable experience although we both agree it’s not the best game ever. While it tries to recreate a roleplaying game experience, the characters haven’t connected with everyone, making it a bit strange to ‘roleplay’ characters you don’t have a feel for. It also doesn’t help our group can only play every other month, which makes us doubt if we have the rules correct every time. But the production is beautiful, the setting interesting and it has some very clever design tricks up its sleeves to make the choose-your-own-adventure parts interactive and interesting for a group. So we’ll happily keep exploring the contents of this enormous box.

We’ll also be playing New Angeles! I got to play it once using Tabletop Simulator once during Covid and loved it so much that I ordered a copy the next day. This game is a brutal semi co-op negotiation game set in the Netrunner universe and I can’t wait to see if it’s just as good in real life. We have ‘power suits and ties’ as dress codes to make it more immersive and we’ll also be serving a business lunch, although we still have to figure out what that actually means…

Do you make environmental choices in your gaming?

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