High Rise is back on Kickstarter so we thought we give a little love since we really enjoy it! We might be a little biased as we played High Rise on the Tabletopia stream with its designer Gil Hova. But then again, he beat us so hard we wouldn’t have made a comic about it if we didn’t think it’s a good game. 😉

High Rise a city-building game in which you build skyscrapers and sometimes have to be a little corrupt to stay ahead of the competition. The corruption mechanism is something we really enjoy in games and we can only name three games that use it: High Rise, Lords of Waterdeep (when using the expansion) and London even though it is called poverty in that game. The games give you corruption points for doing certain actions, these are often more powerful than other actions but you might pay the price later in the game. The costs of that price, often in negative victory points, however, depends on the amount of corruption that is taken by other players. So it helps to take a close look at your fellow players to see how much corruption they are taking on and if they might be making moves to get rid of any corruption points they may already have. The nice thing about such an interactive mechanism is that what you should be doing to win is very dependent on how the table is playing which prevents people from getting stuck in their favorite winning strategy and it keeps the game from becoming stale.

Speaking of games that play great on Tabletopia and use a novel mechanic, we played Villagers yesterday on Tabletopia and we were pretty impressed. It is a pretty light and quick game in which you collect a medieval village and every villager has a specific job like a miner, a lumberjack, or a priest. Some of the jobs can be upgraded resulting in more victory points but less efficient engine building. This makes the timing when to upgrade a little more interesting as you can get stuck with a victory point heavy village that won’t grow anymore. We were also delighted to find out that Haakon Gaarder did both the design and the illustration which is a very impressive feat which not a lot of people do.

This week we don’t have super concrete plans about what we will be playing be I suspect Truffle Shuffle will be played as it’s is becoming our favorite short game when we just want to do something fun for thirty minutes. And then there’s Flat Out Games’ big title Calico which we really enjoy. So many games to choose from though! 🙂