Evacuation

Origin Stories: Evacuation – An Interview With Designer Vladimír Suchý

For this episode of Origin Stories, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Vladimír Suchý. In my mind, his name is synonymous with “something unique and different”. Similar to reading a great novelist, I’m always looking forward to playing his new releases, regardless of the specific story or mechanisms. Whatever one of his games might …

Heat: Pedal to the Metal - Heavy Rain

First Impressions of Heat: Heavy Rain – Rainy Forecast Turns Out to Be Sunny With Clouds

Here we go again! It’s finally time for Heat’s first expansion to hit the market and it’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect: I’ve got a couple of days off work, a serious cold is keeping me mostly indoors, and even the weather here in Hamburg has decided to play along and be appropriately dreadful …

Mosaic board game

Patching Board Games

Hi everyone! Hope you’re having a lovely weekend! I’m not sure where I heard it first, but someone once said that in the first two weeks after releasing an anticipated game, it gets played more often than during all of the months and years of playtesting combined. It’s shocking to hear at first but makes …

High Season: Grand Hotel Roll & Write

Review of High Season: Grand Hotel Roll & Write – Catering to an Audience

Grand Austria Hotel is a game I adore, much more than I rationally should do. It’s punishingly tight, can easily become multiplayer-solitaire, and I get it to the table way too infrequently. But that’s emotions for you, right? There doesn’t have to be a rational explantation why we feel attracted to certain games while we …

Tokyo Highway boardgame

Review of Tokyo Highway – Tiny Traffic Traverses Tricky Tongue Depressors

Have you ever won a game by making your opponent laugh too hard? I have! We were playing Tokyo Highway and the absurd difficulty of the manoeuvre they were trying to pull off just to score one more tiny car simply got me. I couldn’t help myself and started laughing, they laughed, hands shook, and …

Last Light board game

First Impressions of Last Light – A 4x Stratego in Space

There are many good reasons to be interested in a board game: a unique mechanism that hasn’t been seen before, a great theme, a designer one really enjoys. From the top of my head, I can’t think of a game where the outstanding feature that intrigued me was its play length, but that’s exactly what …