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”
I’m not much of a conflict/war gamer. Direct aggression just doesn’t seem to be something I enjoy. I tried Blood Rage once and it wasn’t for me, Cubra Libre for some reason gave me headaches, and playing Clash of Cultures put me in a state of such anxiety that it caused me to preventive strike …
Read more “First Impressions of Halls of Hegra – Congratulations, You Lost!”
As I’ve written before, I like using metal coins when playing board games, especially if they are unique to the game I’m playing. Since a lot of you enjoyed that post, here are some recent acquisitions. I thought I try also something new and give you a close up to enjoy the detail. Metal coin …
Read more “Metal Coins in Board Games 2 – So You’ve Got MORE Metal Coins?”
I was quite disappointed to realise Last Light has no solo mode, so I started creating my own. It’s still under development, but today it produced the first session where it seemed competitive and actually created some nice battles. I’m mainly aiming for full support of all rules/techs/factions, no extra components, and ease of use. …
For me, the the only flaw the excellent Horseless Carriage has is that my friends won’t play it nearly often enough with me! So I designed an automa that can be used both for solo play as well as a third when playing with two players. There are still some elements that need tweaking and …
Welcome back to part 2 of my conversation with Vangelis about Hegemony. If you haven’t read part 1 already, you should do so here. In this part, we talk about the economic aspects of the game, playtesting, running a Kickstarter, and what the future holds for Hegemony but also Hegemonic Project Games. Enjoy! The Economy …
Read more “Origin Stories: Hegemony – An Interview With Co-Designer Vangelis Bagiartakis – Part 2”
Can board games be art? What might have been a controversial question back when I started in the hobby has without a doubt by now been answered by a resounding “YES!”. We have more and more artists that no longer are only mentioned in the fine print (or not at all) but are printed on …
Read more “First Impressions of ICE – A Coffee Table Board Game”