Latest Game Reviews
Beast – Assar and Helga vs. Fangrir – First Impression
I have very little experience with One vs. Many games. I’ve played Scotland Yard once, Betrayal at House on the Hill once, and Pandemic with the bio-terrorist expansion once. All of these experiences have been fine, but none of them have inspired a love for the genre for me. Bear backed the Beast Kickstarter, and has been eagerly anticipating its release, so, for this week’s game night, Beast was the game we played.
Don’t L.L.A.M.A Card Game – Don’t Let Llamas And Markers Accumulate
I recently took a minor vacation to visit my family, but travelling with a toddler is tough enough without carting around extra luggage, so I vowed to pack as leanly as possible. This meant bringing none of my games on vacation with me. Fortunately, there’s a few great game stores in Saskatoon, so I popped into a couple and one of the games I walked out with was a $12 copy of Don’t L.L.A.M.A.
Stronghold 2nd Ed. – Initial Impressions as a Defender
Portal Games tagline is “Board games That Tell Stories”, and in my experience, they do a good job in delivering a story to tell during game night. Neuroshima Hex spins a tale of a standoff, each side getting stronger and stronger with each passing turn, until a climatic battle takes place and razes both sides. Robinson Crusoe is a story of a couple of shipwrecked survivors and how Mother Nature is just going to take their day from bad, to worse, and Stronghold 2nd Edition is basically Helms Deep in a box. Invaders are crashing against the stronghold walls, and if they get through, it’s game over for the defenders.
Pendulum – Worker Placement Pandemonium
Pendulum, by Travis P Jones, and published by Stonemaier Games in 2020, is a real time worker placement game. It was lauded in that it was the highest-rated prototype ever during a Stonemaier Games Design Day. Now, I don’t know what the scoring rubric is for one of those Design Days, but I’m a pretty big fan of Stonemaier Games prior products, like Viticulture and Scythe, and, I absolutely adore real-time games, so this should be a hit for me, right? Let’s find out!
HerStory – Board Game Review
If you’re looking for a complex board game with lots of interlocking mechanisms, and a deep strategic well to plumb, HerStory isn’t going to fulfill that need for you. If you’re looking for an attractive, easy to play game full of inspirational figures that will simultaneously provide you with an activity to engage with, and teach out about some of the accomplishments of women throughout history, then I can’t recommend HerStory enough. I want my little girl growing up knowing there’s nothing she can’t do, and exposing her to the stories of strong, female role models around the house is a great way to start.
Zaberias – A Tactical Skirmish Game for Kids
Zaberias is the kind of game I wished I had as a kid. It presents itself as a fairly light tactical skirmish game where you throw yourself against an opponent. Considering just how much Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones I was playing on my GameBoy Advance back in the day, I’m sure I would have loved to get my hands on this game.
Gloomhaven – My Experience With the Big Red Box
Full Disclosure: Cephalofair Games has provided me with a review copy of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion Introduction I have a somewhat complicated relationship with Gloomhaven. Back in 2017 when I was only a year or two into playing board games, and didn't have a...
Tension in Games
Humans are bad at randomness. That’s just a fact. The most salient example I can think of is that Apple had to make their shuffle feature less random on their early generations of iPods because of complaints that the randomization of songs didn’t feel random enough. It feels ironic that in order to make the playlist ‘feel’ more random, they actually had to make it less.
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