I bought Kanban EV so long ago that I can’t even remember what made me aware of it in the first place. Maybe I saw it in the BGG top games ranking (currently at an impressive number 46) or in No Pun Included’s excellent review of it, I don’t know. What I do still remember …
Well, I’ve been thinking about starting a Patreon as a sort of free newsletter for a while now and as always, it took a kind reader to push me over the edge 😀 patreon.com/TalkingShelfSpace As you might or might not know, I write about board games as a hobby with no intention to make money …
I’m not an 18xx aficionado. To tell the truth, I’m not even much of a train gamer. Besides a single play of 1830: Railways & Robber Barons (which I didn’t enjoy) and a handful of attempts at Age of Steam (which I’m slowly warming up to but still far from in love with), my experience …
Read more “First Impressions of Railways of the Lost Atlas – 18xx for the Rest of Us”
I usually don’t do previews. Heck, I’ve even kindly declined designers who wanted to help me out with review copies. After all, writing about board games is a hobby for me and I fear more the pressure of having to write about some game I might end up not enjoying than having to waste my …
Read more “Preview of World Order — Elegantly Treading a Very Thin Line”
I like Vital Lacerda’s games: Kanban EV is still one of my all time favourites, I previously wrote about Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, and by now I was fortunate to have either played or owned most of his big box titles. One that unfortunately hadn’t struck a cord with me was the fan-favourite The Gallerist, …
Read more “Review of House of Fado – It Swings Baby, It Swings!”
Sometimes a game just hits you. It scratches an itch you didn’t know you had, like when I first played Horseless Carriage and its spatial puzzle just completely fried my brain. It was too complex a system for me to understand, too many things to think through, and so I gave up, had fun, and …
Read more “First impressions of Rival Cities – Multi-Dimensional Tug of War”
I just got Rival Cities in the other day and thought it would have been great if a solo mode would have been in the box. Since there isn’t, I of course started creating one myself 😀 This is still in development, but it plays surprisingly well for a first attempt. I will continue to tweak …
The last couple of days, I’ve been enamoured with Rival Cities, the new 2p games from Andreas Steding (also the designer of Hansa Teutonica). It’s a clever, has a beautiful production, but I had one minor gripe with: sliding the court case cards down the line and managing the cardboard tracks next to them is …
It’s only the second expansion for Heat: Pedal to the Metal, but Heat: Tunnel Vision presents what by now feels like a familiar recipe: two new tracks (again only one of which features the titular mechanism), a new upgrade / sponsor card type, a new 4-card championship, and a new color of racer. But does …
Read more “First Impressions of Heat: Tunnel Vision – Is More of the Same a Good or Bad Thing?”
Looking back at 2024, Rise & Fall was one of the few stand-out games for me that a) did something radically different I hadn’t seen in another game before and b) I could see myself actually still playing in five years time. What initially looked like just another over-produced crowd funding game turned out to …
Read more “Origin Stories: Rise & Fall – An Interview With Designer Christophe Boelinger”