There are tons of cool items to be found in the fictional world of board games, but while we were playing Décorum two weeks ago, we saw the adorable green lamp set again (you can see some here). I’m sure Heinze would try to make those in real life if he had the time, haha.

There was a shift in the work schedule and our Middara game night was advanced one day but since we had to stop early (due to a very early morning the next day) – Middara was off the table and we decided to play some other shorter games. Our friend always liked Gaslands and since we’ve been hyping Joyride as THE alternative to Gaslands, it was time to show him! Although he liked the game, he felt it strongly lacked the weapon aspect that Gaslands has. Ironically, I hardly remember the weapons from Gaslands and didn’t care for those at all so it’s an interesting point of view. Our game was exciting though! Anybody who fell behind at one point managed to regain a chance for victory and we all ended up together in the very last corner. And that has been our experience every time, it’s impressive. After Joyride, we still had an hour left and decided to end the night with a game of Triqueta and Can’t Stop!

Later that week, we had another game night planned and we didn’t know what we were going to play yet, except for Beverbende (also known as Rat-a-Tat Cat) because one of our friends had never played it. Since I have no clue if this is mostly popular in The Netherlands, here it goes: It’s a silly little game with a memory aspect, some bluff, and, a lot of luck. Each player has four facedown cards in front of them. At the start of a round, you peek at your two outer cards. The deck consists mostly of numbered cards (0–9), but also includes special action cards. Your goal is to have the lowest total score at the end of the round. On your turn, you draw a card from the deck. If it’s a number card, you can choose to swap it with one of your four facedown cards (without looking at it first). Some special action cards allow you to peek at, swap, or manipulate cards—adding a bluffing element. One of the funniest mechanics is that if you still have a facedown action card in front of you at the end of the round, you must replace it with the first number card from the deck—meaning you could get lucky or end up with a high-value card. Ouch!

After that, we decided to play our friend’s copy of Shark he really wanted to play before deciding whether the game would leave his collection or not. Spoiler alert, the game will be leaving his collection. 😉 The luck aspect of the dice in this game was mostly annoying, it didn’t help that the colored die kept rolling yellow 60% of the time. There was little depth to this game but hey, we enjoyed our game but all agreed we’ve got way better auction games in our combined collections. The old-school aesthetic of this edition was lovely though. We ended the night with a game of Caution Signs because it’s just a guaranteed good time.

We received our copy of Intarsia! The game still looked as lovely as we remembered. We did make the mistake of playing with the symmetrical side of the player board with just two players… that wasn’t great. We’ll try the asymmetrical sides of the board next time the give the game the benefit of the doubt. Else, we’ll just keep in mind that the game is way better at the highest player count. With two, there was absolutely no tension in getting the achievements since we could both focus on two out of four colors and we ended up with a one-point difference.

On Saturday, Heinze played a six-player game of Xia with all the expansions and some extra empty space tiles. I cannot tell you how it went, only that it took about five hours to play a 20-point game with that many players. 😛 In the evening, we played a quick game of Compile in which I made the silly mistake of not getting any “aggressive” protocols that actively influenced the other player’s cards by either deleting, flipping, or moving them. Whoops, noted for next time. It’s still a great lane-battling game though!