We’re very excited about going to UKGE but our luggage space is limited so I’ve been looking more at games that come in book form, like RPGs and miniature games, to save space. The metaphor to describe what I’m experiencing would be if I didn’t know what ice cream was and saw an ice cream parlor for the first time with its many flavors and thinking to myself ‘Why would you need more than vanilla and maybe chocolate?’.
So far, I’ve got my eyes on When the Nightmares Come, a Lovecraftianesque miniature game with some RPG elements. We own a lot of Mansions of Madness, so we can play right away. I also always wanted a printed version of Mörk Borg or its Cyberpunk spin-off, as its (gory) graphic design continues to inspire me. There are loads more like the Doomed, Vaesen, and Five Parsecs from Home that I might bring home hoping they will turn our kitchen tables into a magical experience.

But enough about games that come in books, let’s talk about what we played this week!

We played our third session of Middara, which we’ve all concluded is a really fun game with art we really dislike. It’s a big dungeon-crawling campaign game that lets you make all sorts of character builds, and so far the story has been entertaining enough plus combat offers interesting choices while keeping things moving at a brisk pace. The art however is so busy trying to show ‘sexy’ anime girls it just distracts us with questions like “why would you wear such a short skirt into battle when you also have to fit in a tail underneath it?“. We had to convince our third player to first finish our Descent campaign (just three sessions left) instead of abandoning it, so that should show how much we like the scenarios in this game so far.

On Friday we played two games of Tigris & Euphrates which, even though we made a comic about it, we both had no real recollection of how it played. It’s really good but we do have to play it some more to get good at it, the game has loads of moments that reward creative play that don’t seem optimal at first glance, and during these two games we continuously saw moves that surprised us. Even though it’s almost thirty years old, we would recommend this to anyone, doubly if you would like to see a Knizia game that is a little more tricky.

We also got Gloomhaven Buttons & Bugs which we kinda bought on a lark. We love Nikki Valens work and a tiny Gloomhaven sounded like a fun novelty to own. To our surprise, it turns out the game is engaging and comes with a lot of stuff in its tiny box. We’ve both started a campaign (it’s a solo game after all) after doing the tutorial together. The box contains 20 scenarios but some are unique for certain character classes. I’m playing the Brute which has a different third scenario for example. It is also quite hard, I’ve lost the second scenario three times, so completing the campaign might take me a while… (no, I’m not willing to switch to the easy difficulty, thank you very much)

We also played Mandala and Rollecate which are hard-to-explain games but are excellent. Just get both, push yourself to play Rollecate dangerously, and thank us later. 😉

Lastly, we played a secret unannounced game, that made us feel very dumb but we laughed a lot. It might not have been the smartest move to play this very late on a Sunday night when everyone at the table was tired but it did give us plenty of inspiration for the comic we’ll be making for it…

Today is Whit Monday, so we’re off to play some Acquire and Challengers! See you soon!