This happened during a game night not very long ago. A friend of ours grabbed some bowls to put snacks in, he couldn’t have known he grabbed the ones we use for Apollo’s wet food. The sound of the bowl immediately activated Apollo and he was right there with us in the kitchen with a look of “FOOD?! ALREADY? FOOD?!” At that point, you can do very little but give in and feed him an hour early. 😉 If Starbuck was still alive, she most definitely would have jumped that table out of enthusiasm.

It was the post-UKGE week and the week after a convention always is a little rough. We were lower on energy due to the intense previous week and in Heinze’s case: he started with his new job so that was also really exciting. Even though that, we actually did play some games – which we didn’t really expect!  We mostly played small games and one very big and chunky one. 😀

Last week, we got ourselves our first Oink game after it was recommended to us by two separate friends: Moving Wild. We played it and it’s a fun little drafting game with Forest Shuffle/Ark Nova vibes. We think it might be more interesting with three or four players (a more exciting draft) but if you don’t have a lot of space in your luggage, this packs quite a game for its size! I believe it will be released later this year, we got lucky that they sold a few at the fair!

I played the third scenario of Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs and after losing in the second round the first time, I made it to the next level the second time with more than ten health on the counter (oh… healing might be more important than I thought), hurray! We also played two games of Flip Over Frog which has such a fun mechanic! The only issue is that we’ve played it three times now and Heinze doesn’t seem to be able to win… When we played Star Wars: Unlimited again that night with our drafted UKGE decks, he did win (good for morale)! It’s interesting how we both have decks using the same faction icons but we do have completely different decks.

On Friday, it was time for a game night with our storytelling games group! We played The Quiet Year, which I’ve heard so much about. During the game, you all draw a map of your world together. You are presented with situations and you’ll have to decide what to do and how it influences your world. This way, you slowly add things to the map as you discover more about the world you’re creating together. We did play a shortened version (we started a little late) and noticed that we shouldn’t do that the next time because you just need a little more time to build things up. Nonetheless, we all liked it and I see us playing this again. A tip if you want to play it, we used the roll of paper from Ikea (MÅLA collection). It’s slightly off-white and gives it a cool look.

Saturday was the day of the BIG game! We played Stefan Feld’s upcoming game Civolution together with Eerko from BGstats. Setting the game up for the first time took us an hour. Getting through the rules together took us about two hours and playing the game took us 3:40 hours. Taking into account that this was our first play, which was rather overwhelming, I reckon we would be able to shave that down to three hours in our next play. But oh boy, there’s a lot happening in this game! However, everything did feel ‘logical’ and the graphic design of the boards is excellent. Everything you can do is clearly communicated. There’s just so much! I ended up with a very powerful combo of cards which made exploring and walking around the board very lucrative so I ended up in first place with 213 points with Heinze and Eerko far behind with 155 and 142 points. However, I’m quite certain that I got lucky and won’t get that chance the next time though…