Latest Posts
Viticulture: Bordeaux – Board Game Expansion Review
I’ve always found Viticulture to be a bit of a fascinating contradiction. On one hand, it presents this warm, inviting fantasy of running a Tuscan vineyard, slowly cultivating grapes, building various structures to support your wine making enterprise, and hiring the right staff to help launch your vineyard to success. On the other hand, the much more real hand, it’s a ruthless efficiency race where you need to optimize every single action if you actually want to win. Viticulture has gone through many iterations at this point, from the Tuscany expansion that blew up the options for players to choose, to the Viticulture: Essential Edition which shrunk it back down, taking the best ideas from the original game and expansion, to the Tuscany: Essential Edition which took that shrunk down version and bloated it back up just a little bit, to Viticulture World, which offered a collaborative spin on the wine making formula. Having so many options and ways to play means that there’s probably a preferred vintage for every Viticulture player out there. So when the Bordeaux expansion was announced, and it was “just a board” expansion, I was skeptical. Is just a board enough to meaningfully change the experience when there’s already so much variety in the Viticulture extended universe?
Pirates of Maracaibo – Board Game Review
I have a complicated relationship with Alexander Pfister games. And by complicated relationship, I mean I actively dislike most of his designs. Great Western Trail, Blackout Hong Kong, and Maracaibo all illicit feelings of frustration and hatred from my heart when I...
Kabuto Sumo – Board Game Review
Sometimes, I come into a game with no expectations at all, and then am pleasantly surprised when the game turns out to be amazing. Take Time, Scout, and No Thanks are all examples of games that I knew almost nothing about before playing utterly falling in love. The flip side of that scenario is when you keep seeing pictures of a game all over social media, you stalk the game’s BGG page, you voraciously consume every review and commentary about the game because it looks like so much fun, but then when you actually get to play it, it just falls flat. And unfortunately, Kabuto Sumo falls into the latter family for me
Tatsumi – Board Game Review
In Tatsumi, each player is a Tatsu, a guardian dragon, trying to collect elemental rings from a 5 by 5 grid of ocean wells, and offer them to shrines in order to cover their island and score the most points.
Hungry Monkey – Board Game Review
I don’t know what’s changed about me lately, but I often found myself prefering the shorter card games instead of the big, heavy, rules-dense board games that used to dominate my life. Maybe it’s just the phase of life I’m in, the fatigue that comes with raising young children, or maybe I’ve finally accepted that not every game needs to be prefaced by an hour of studing the rulebook to feel like time well spend. So when Hungry Monkey, designed by Erik Andersson Sundén and published by HeidelBÄR Games in 2022, came out during a pub night with friends, I was intrigued. Another small-box card game? Can’t wait to find out more!
Heat: Pedal to the Metal – Board Game Review
I do love the bicycle racing board game Flamme Rouge, and when the designers of that (Asger Aleksandrov Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen) came out with another racing game, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Although, I found myself predisposed to disliking Heat. Upon its launch it immediately got a bunch of critical acclaim, and I felt weirdly betrayed. How dare the community move on from Flamme Rouge so easily, and for a game about grotesque cars!? How inelegant! My monocle nearly popped off my eye at the mere thought of it.
Final Fantasy PlayStation 1 Trilogy Retrospective
Playing through Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX back-to-back really drives home just how much of a turning point the PlayStation era was for the series. The series moved on from being so iterative and really started getting experimental in big, albeit sometimes messy ways. I’m not sure if there were too many cooks in the kitchen, but one thing for sure is that kitchen got a lot bigger. These 3 games feel like they come from larger teams with bigger ambitions, each one trying to push the franchise in a new direction, rather than just refine or tweak what came before.
The White Castle – Board Game Review
The White Castle, has players trying to advance the standing of their clan with the daimyo of Himeji Castle in feudal Japan. And right out of the gate, I felt intrigued. Dice drafting/worker placement? Yes! Tight resource and a penchant for combos? Yes please! Feudal Japanese theme? Sounds like my kind of game!
