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 …
Read more “Origin Stories: Evacuation – An Interview With Designer Vladimír Suchý”
I always planned to – at some point – write about games that have been part of my collection for a longer time. I guess it has taken me two years and a current lull of interesting new releases to finally get there. While there are a great many “older” games out there that players …
We’re in an interesting part of the year when it comes to the board gaming world. The lull of Christmas time and all those end-year recaps is over, crowd funding is only slowly picking up pace again, and fulfillments are still a bit out. The two most interesting things that have happened lately for me …
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 …
Read more “First Impressions of Heat: Heavy Rain – Rainy Forecast Turns Out to Be Sunny With Clouds”
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 …
Do you know that feeling when you see a crowd funding project and immediately fall in love with its visual presentation but at the same time get super skeptical regarding its game play? It just looks too good? There are positive and negative surprises when venturing into that territory. For example, I remember first seeing …
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 …
Read more “Review of High Season: Grand Hotel Roll & Write – Catering to an Audience”
Redwood is a super cute select-pattern-and-move game about photographing animals. The solo scenarios that come in the box didn’t feel that exciting to me though, so here is my attempt at an alternate solo mode. It can also be used to spice up the competition with low player counts. I’ll update this post as I …
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 …
Read more “Review of Tokyo Highway – Tiny Traffic Traverses Tricky Tongue Depressors”
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 …
Read more “First Impressions of Last Light – A 4x Stratego in Space”