A game that mentions in its rulebook to the players that they should treat it as a racing game. It’s something we first encountered in the manual of Tribes of the Wind and found very odd. To be fair, it is a better game if you approach it that way because otherwise, the score will always end in a (near) tie.
Ancient Knowledge was less explicitly saying it in the rulebook but we discovered our own you had to play it as a racing game on after I overwhelmingly won a game after trying to see how quickly you could finish the game. When we mentioned it to someone from the Flat Rivier Group, who distributes the game, they mentioned that the expansion did mention it in the rulebook as it was an important part of the game.

While we enjoy both games, especially Ancient Knowledge, we do wonder if having to mention something like this to the players is a shortcoming of its design. The theme of both games, Tribes of the Wind is about rebuilding Earth after a climate change disaster and Ancient Knowledge is about building a civilization, don’t feel like it’s going to be a race. Both games also offer plenty of ways to build scoring engines that don’t lean towards speeding up the game. So a player like Rachel has to suppress her interest in exploring combos to keep up with a player like me who is more into hitting the end game triggers fast.

Speaking of games that do things a little differently, we played “a Fake Artist Goes to New York” for the first time, which is a bit weird as we made a comic about it six years ago! It’s a hidden role-drawing game in which all the players know what to draw, except for one player. A small piece of paper is passed around the table and every “artist” draws a single line. After the piece of paper has done two full rotations across the table the artist gets to vote for who they think is the fake artist. If they guess correctly the fake artist has one chance to guess what they were drawing together to pull out a last-minute win. It’s a great and fun game that prevents the artist from drawing something else as they won’t gain any information about who might be the fake artist. We can’t wait to play it a lot more and frame all the tiny strange drawings to form a mini exposition in our house.

We also played Middle Ages, we love the bigger games Studio H games like Oltree and Northgard but this one was a lot lighter and quicker than those games. It’s a new version of Majesty: For the Realm or if you don’t know that (as we did) it has some overlap with King Domino. We thought it was a pretty clever design thought it might not be the best with two as some of its take-that elements don’t feel great with just one opponent. Luckily, the rules are easy and the games are short, so we should not have a problem trying it with some more friends.

We also played some other games that we’ve played before like Ransom Notes, which is probably one of our favorite “a jury member chooses the funniest response” in which you use word magnets to make sentences. We also played more Undaunted Callisto is a very cool and dynamic twist on the classic Undaunted. Lastly, we continued our Middara campaign which does so many things well it’s a bit of a shame the art is so “cheesecake”-y.

This week we have some cool games planned with a dexterity games evening and we playing the second scenario of War Story, which left a very strong impression after the first one.