Calico is a brilliant game. We and others online have already predicted it could win a Spiel Des Jahres if it is able to comply with the necessary rules, like having a German release, that are necessary to be considered for the prestigious award. The graphics and the setting are all cuddly and cute, luring you into a tile-laying game with three different ways of scoring that seem to work against each other. While the rules are light, the decisions the game creates are tricky to overcome perfectly, leading to a lot of shouts of “why is this so hard?” while playing.

This week has been a pretty game-light week as we only played three(!) games. It’s a combination of being very busy with work as well as a pretty heavy Valheim addiction. 😉 We played Villagers for the first time with three players which suddenly made us very aware of how sparse food and housing cards actually are! It shocked us a bit as we thought this was a pretty relaxed game but it turns out it becomes a bit more of a race when playing with more. We also played (the world first?) three-player game of Hive! We made a set of resin stone for a third player a couple of years ago as we had some leftover resin from a big project. The stones came out really great but somehow we never played a three-player game. We decided that the player that closed in the first queen would win the game. This resulted in an interesting back and forth, trying to defend each other’s queen from someone else being able to take the last stone. While it is a bit long, with the right set of rules and bugs this could be a nice heavier version of Hive.

Lastly, Board and Dice was kind enough to send us their latest addition to the Escape Tales series, Children of Wyrmwoods. We enjoy escape room games but we hadn’t tried any of the Escape Tales games and after they ran a mini ARG on Twitter last year, we were interested in what the games were like. So far we’ve played through the tutorial which had a couple of nice, but not super creative, puzzles. The ambition for the game seems pretty high though, with a story that should take about 8 hours, a world map, characters with stats, and sixty different endings, we are very curious how this escape room will ramp up into what could be a puzzle heavy RPG.