Ok, so it's actually the day after Valentine's Day, but there were a lot of things going on yesterday and it was hard to keep up with all of them. One was the giveaway from Blue Orange and Board Game Revolution. However, it's not too late to join! If you'd like a free copy of Kingdomino and Queendomino, go put your name in the hat.
Ok, so it's actually the day after Valentine's Day, but there were a lot of things going on yesterday and it was hard to keep up with all of them. One was the giveaway from Blue Orange and Board Game Revolution. However, it's not too late to join! If you'd like a free copy of Kingdomino and Queendomino, go put your name in the hat.
From the announcement: (note: all references to "this post" refer to the Blue Orange post. Replying here won't get you entered into the drawing!)
*****Valentine’s Day Royal Wedding Giveaway***** To celebrate Valentine’s Day, we are giving you all the chance to win the perfect pair! We have partnered up with Board Game Revolution to offer you not one but TWO chances at scoring a Kingdomino and Queendomino bundle. Follow the contest guidelines below and then head over to Board Game Revolution's contest page (link below) for a second shot at winning the bundle!
To enter: - Make sure you like this post, and our page - Tag the person or people you want to play this bundle with in the comments and tell us why you chose them!
(1 contest winner will be selected at random, Contest runs 2/14 to 2/21, Midnight PST, US only)
Woo! Saturday! Woo! I've... got nothing, really. I'm about to head over to a friend's place to game. So let's just dive into the reviews, shall we? We shall.
This week, we have: Wordstacker, Wordsy, Dragoon, Founders of Gloomhaven, Quest for the Antidote, Tokaido, Marvel Legendary: Noir, Quiver, Thunderbirds, Beasts of Balance, Stop Thief!, Zoo Ball, Automobiles: Racing Season, Between Two Cities: Capitals, Far Space Foundry, Good Cop Bad Cop, Unlock!, The Cohort, Star Scrapper: Cave In, Century: Spice Road, This War of Mine, Barenpark, Heldentaufe, Kingdomino, Pathfinder Adventures app, and Space Invaders Dice.
Woo! Saturday! Woo! I've... got nothing, really. I'm about to head over to a friend's place to game. So let's just dive into the reviews, shall we? We shall.
This week, we have: Wordstacker, Wordsy, Dragoon, Founders of Gloomhaven, Quest for the Antidote, Tokaido, Marvel Legendary: Noir, Quiver, Thunderbirds, Beasts of Balance, Stop Thief!, Zoo Ball, Automobiles: Racing Season, Between Two Cities: Capitals, Far Space Foundry, Good Cop Bad Cop, Unlock!, The Cohort, Star Scrapper: Cave In, Century: Spice Road, This War of Mine, Barenpark, Heldentaufe, Kingdomino, Pathfinder Adventures app, and Space Invaders Dice.
theMCGuiRE review takes a look at Dragoon from Lay Waste Games. We also get a look at the new rogue and barbarian expansions made available through kickstarter!
What a great and fantastic looking game - unbelievable! Available in both Gold and plastic editions! So go for the gold and get 50 gold before anyone else for the win in this awesome tactical game.
theMCGuiRE review takes a look at Founders of Gloomhaven, the brand new game from Isaac Childres and I can't wait for people to get their hands on this one. It's a euro at heart but fuels the lore of Gloomhaven as you are founding the original city before what you experience in the campaign of Gloomhaven.
You get a lot here in this game! Worker placement, card management, resource management, strategy, great artwork, and fantastic mechanics! the kickstarter is going on right now! If you are a Gloomhaven fan - you are going to want this title in the Gloomhaven universe! (at least I think so - the theme is rich and lore is definitely there - this is a different game though - so please make note of that.)
theMCGuiRE review takes a look at Quest For The Antidote, a new one from Upper Deck and a very fun family game indeed! In Quest For The Antidote you are questing around a very fun filled map to acuqire the components you need for your antidote. you only have 50 breaths to make it happen, so make every move and action count!
Tokaido is a game in which you gain VP for the experiences you take in on a journey. But you can only do so much and compete with your opponents for the same experiences.
Marvel Noir is the latest expansion for Marvel Legendary the Deckbuilding Game. It features heroes and villains from the Noir Universe and mixes up gameplay a bit.
The Quiver is a card-carrying case you can use to make your card games or small board games portable. You can even use it for carrying other things you want to keep organized and protected.
Thunderbirds the board game was created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the TV show. It is a cooperative game where players must rescue victims, stop disasters and thwart the Hood.
The Capitals expansion adds 3 new elements that, according to Stonemaier Games, are designed to all work together, so you should either play with all of them or none. That being said, you could probably mix and match if you wanted to. In addition to the three game play changes, the expansion also comes with some new city tokens.
The specific functional aspects of Far Space Foundry would take a bit too long to explain in this article. In brief, players are space merchants mining asteroids for two different types of ore. Mining occurs in the first half of the game and a rondel/mancala mechanism delivers that ore to a player’s freighters.
In the second half of the game, the ore is used to produce goods which can then be “charged”. Points are scored for maximizing the utility of a player’s ships and the number and kinds of products produced. Points are also deducted for empty space on ships or not upgrading ships.
Players are assigned the team of either being honest or crooked cops by being dealt three secret role cards to each player, with the majority of role cards in hand determining which team a player is on. Two players are also secretly assigned the role of the leader of each of the teams. The goal of the game is for the players to determine who the leader of the rival team is and eliminate them from the game.
Each game of Unlock! comes with a deck of cards and a smaller “tutorial deck”. The teaching deck is identical in all versions of the game.
Players begin the game with a single card deputizing the room they are in and a deck of cards (we sorted our deck by number before the game to make it easier to find cards). During the game, players will need to solve puzzles to gain access to new cards, leading them further down the rabbit hole.
The starting player and every player following has three phases to their turn. They first take two cards from the shuffled deck, look at both of them, and give one to a player of their choice and keep the other.
The second phase is optional and allows players to take a card from their hand and place it face-up on the table to start or add to a Cohort. Once a player has played the required number of unit cards to complete the Cohort, the set is placed face down and the player no longer suffers the effect of that unit type. They also choose a player to discard all the cards from their hand. In the last phase, the player discards down to the maximum hand size of 4 if necessary.
I have come to the realisation that the hallmark of a great game is one when you look at your options, mull over your choices and then let out a cry of exasperation. It is that moment when you realise that to pull off that game winning moving you really should have started your plan in motion three turns ago, or that you are simply one action or one resource short of pulling off a complete blinder.
I say this because my time with Star Scrapper: Cave In has been embarrassingly short, to the point where I feel slightly dishonest in using the word review in the title, (not too I guilty mind you as an article titled first impressions never gets the traction it deserves) but I will say within my brief time with Star Scrapper Cave In there have been multiple cries of anguish, so surely it is a truly great game.
I’ll just come out and say it. Century Spice Road from Plan B Games is a surprise for me. And a very pleasant one at that. Steve talked about it in one of our recent podcasts and he liked it. So much so that before he’d finished banging on about it, I’d one-clicked it during the recording and waited to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out that our resident Welshman may have had a point.
Anyone alive in the 90s who owned an Amiga will almost certainly have remembered the Sensible Software game “Cannon Fodder”. If you don’t remember the game, look it up. I’ll wait.
I mention Cannon Fodder because it came with the tagline: “War has never been so much fun”. And it was right – Cannon Fodder was awesome and still stands as one of my favourite games of all time. Making those little men dance across the screen as you shot their twitching corpses was highly entertaining, if a little morbid.
Cannon Fodder, however, is a complete polar opposite to the subject of this review – with the tagline “In war, not everyone is a soldier”. Also beginning life as a video game, This War of Mine is a rather brutal and harrowing depiction of the early 90’s Siege of Sarajevo from the point of view of a group of civilians trying to eke out an existence in a city that’s seen more shells than Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It’s fair to say that absolutely nothing depicted in This War of Mine could be described as “fun”.
The correct term to describe Bärenpark is a polyominoes positioning game (or Tetris shapes as I prefer to call them). Each turn you will attempt to place one of the odd shaped pieces, made of either public amenities or one of the various bear enclosures, into your park. The name of the game is efficiency, as you race to fill your park as quickly as possible but also maximise its scoring.
The day that you have been waiting for has come. At last, you can prove that you are worthy of being a member of the Hero‘s council. Show them your skills by collecting the golden monster teeth. But be aware – the lands of Taora are not as peaceful as they seem. Rumor has it, that in the dark and gloomy Netherworld, some friends become enemies…
Now get up and hurry! The Heldentaufe already started. Be the first who returns the teeth of glory.
As the name implies, Kingdomino is a twist on the classic tile-laying game, dominoes. This game takes it up a notch by adding pretty art, castles, a twist on the turn order rules, and different scoring. The goal remains the same, however: Score the most points.
Each player has king meeples (the number depends on the number of players), a castle, and a starting tile. The castle is placed on top of the starting tile at the beginning of the game and placed in front of yourself. This is the humble beginning of your kingdom.
Once upon a time, we reviewed the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, a legacy-style card game/RPG mashup that let you build your character in the form of a deck and some limited stats over a series of adventures. Now, Pathfinder Adventures is a digital version of PACG available on all platforms – including Steam – and part of Asmodee Digital’s prolific board game app library.
The game’s premise is just like the original: aliens are attacking the Earth and it’s up to you to blast them all to smithereens. Each player takes a score sheet that looks just like the video game, with space invaders neatly laid out in a 11×6 grid and each row of invaders worth different point values. At the top of the sheet are the hard-to-hit UFOs worth the most points.
Blame Canada (Day), but it seems that the post got eaten by the system. It happens occasionally, but it's alright. We can rebuild it. We can make it stronger, faster, better... Or mostly the same but with this new intro.
Anyway, this week we have: Werewords, Caverna: Cave vs Cave, Not Alone, Evolution: The Beginning, Black Hat, Big Bang 13.7, Kingdomino, Match Madness, Lady Richmond, Century: Spice Road, Homes: 2 Player Card Game, Coldwater Crown, Quadropolis, and This War Of Mine.
Blame Canada (Day), but it seems that the post got eaten by the system. It happens occasionally, but it's alright. We can rebuild it. We can make it stronger, faster, better... Or mostly the same but with this new intro.
Anyway, this week we have: Werewords, Caverna: Cave vs Cave, Not Alone, Evolution: The Beginning, Black Hat, Big Bang 13.7, Kingdomino, Match Madness, Lady Richmond, Century: Spice Road, Homes: 2 Player Card Game, Coldwater Crown, Quadropolis, and This War Of Mine.
Evolution: The Beginning pits players’ species against each other as they adapt traits in order to consume the most food from the communal watering hole, or other species. At the end of the game, the player who has collected the most food throughout the game is the winner.
Player pawns on a board representing a computer network stand in for the computer access of players as they navigate through information systems. By winning card tricks, players can move their pawns through systems with the aim of staying on the most valuable spaces when scoring occurs at the end of a round. Players will gain points for cards in hand and the spaces their pawns occupy, however, the lowest score wins.
Players in Big Bang 13.7 (hereafter just referred to as Big Bang) take the role of galactic, supreme forces or gods (if you prefer). They shape the cosmos by playing hexagonal tiles representing stars, planets and other cosmological bodies. At the end of the game, players will score points by making sure tiles that match their objectives line up.
In Kingdomino, players are seeking to expand their kingdom over the course of the game. Each round, players will be drafting colored tiles, and adding them to their existing territory using a simple tile-laying mechanic. Scoring is based on the size of each area, multiplied by any crown symbols present.
Match Madness comes with rules for two modes of play. In Quick Play, each player gets a set of five puzzle blocks and a number of objective cards are placed face down in the middle of the table in a single stack. The top card is revealed and all players simultaneously race to arrange their blocks to match the card.
If you believe you have made a match, quickly grab the card and then all players will verify that you truly have a match. If so, keep the card and play continues as another card is revealed. If you made an error and your blocks do not match the card, you can no longer compete for it as the others continue to make a match.
Lady Richmond is an auction game for two to five players. Players are potential heirs to Lady Richmond, fighting for their inheritance at the auction block. The player with the most valuable assets at the end of the game wins.
Century: Spice Road is the first in a series of games that explores the history of each century with spice-trading as the theme for the first installment. In Century: Spice Road, players are caravan leaders who travel the famed silk road to deliver spices to the far reaches of the continent for fame and glory. Each turn, players perform one of four actions:
Establish a trade route (by taking a market card) Make a trade or harvest spices (by playing a card from hand) Fulfill a demand (by meeting a victory point card’s requirements and claiming it) Rest (by taking back into your hand all of the cards you’ve played) The last round is triggered once a player has claimed their fifth victory point card, then whoever has the most victory points wins.
In February 1895, London woke up to a loud bang. A large pillar of smoke showed that a bomb had exploded in the Houses of Parliament. Security forces were activated immediately and they arrested a suspicious young laborer near the area.
Mycroft Holmes, at the service of the crown, was commissioned to investigate the relationship of the young laborer with anarchist groups. He thinks it will be an easy task that he can do from the comfort of his armchair in the Diogenes Club — until he is informed of disturbing news; his younger brother Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, has been hired by the boy’s parents to prove the innocence of his son, who believes to be a scapegoat of a dark conspiracy.
Is that “victory” you taste in the salty air? You’ve secured your spot as a competitor in the world-renowned Coldwater Crown fishing tournament, and the contest has just begun! Will you be able to cast the right bait at the right time to reel-in the biggest fish? Will you be able to strategically balance your efforts at the different fishing locations to win the most trophies? Very little is certain on these frigid waters, but it’s guaranteed the fish will be biting!
Coldwater Crown is a fun and clever board game that captures the thrill of fishing in a tabletop experience. Created by acclaimed game designer Brian Suhre, it’s a game of strategic planning, angler’s intuition, and just the right amount of luck! Test your fishing expertise against up to three of your friends or hone your skills at the practice pond. You don’t have to be a master angler to win, but once your trophy count begins to stack up, you might just feel like one!
theMCGuiRE review takes a look at This War Of Mine the Board Game! Based on a popular video game, This War Of Mine offers a rich RPG like game play with multiple games phases that take place over the course of a 24 hour period. Although it has aspects of a RPG - it is a true board game. The games offers "saving", which makes it easy to pick up and go after a session and then unpack and start game play right back up.
As you play through the game, you experience real life as it would be in this environment and the design is fantastic!!! This game is so much fun and really takes you on a journey. It's a BUY - 100% ! I could not recommend it more.
Hello Saturday! How are you? Is everything going well? Of course it is! It's Saturday!
So, let's not wait around. Let's get right to the reviews so we can get back to it being Saturday. Personally, I'm thinking of watching a movie and questioning Netflix's algorithms in what "more like this" really means...
Today we have: The Pirate Republic, Kingdomino, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Board Game - Shadows of the Past, Adrenaline, Ave Roma, Hero Realms, Food Truck Champion, Sorcerers' Skirmish, Carcassonne: Amazonas, Oceanos, The Flow of History, Citadels, Broken Legions, Haspelknecht, and GKR: Heavy Hitters.
Hello Saturday! How are you? Is everything going well? Of course it is! It's Saturday!
So, let's not wait around. Let's get right to the reviews so we can get back to it being Saturday. Personally, I'm thinking of watching a movie and questioning Netflix's algorithms in what "more like this" really means...
Today we have: The Pirate Republic, Kingdomino, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Board Game - Shadows of the Past, Adrenaline, Ave Roma, Hero Realms, Food Truck Champion, Sorcerers' Skirmish, Carcassonne: Amazonas, Oceanos, The Flow of History, Citadels, Broken Legions, Haspelknecht, and GKR: Heavy Hitters.
theMCGuiRE review takes a look at the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Board Game - Shadows of the Past from IDW Publishing and Kevin Wilson. Man Kevin really made a fun game here and how could you go wrong with the TMNT theme! When I first heard this was coming and Kevin was the designer, I was instantly "in". This is the EPIC Works edition and is packed to the brim with everything you could want. I cant wait to see what they add to this system. I also have the new April O'Neil Hero pack coming out soon to retail.
this is the first in a two part series to unbox this massive game and then play through a few turns. So strap in and get ready to open up this epic game with Part I: The Opening!
Adrenaline is a first-person shooter in board game form. It is action-packed but requires good area control and resource management to win.
Adrenaline does a good job of mixing theme with tactics. On the surface it might look like a random shoot-em-up, but it has a solid Eurogame foundation.
I received Ave Roma in 2016 following the successful Kickstarter campaign and straight away I was impressed. It arrived promptly and looks great straight out of the box. Due to the Kickstarter, it includes a bunch of expansions which really do make the game very good value. A few nice touches to make the workers pillars instead of discs all adds to the appearance. But this is all so much finery – but very much keeping with the theme. Ave Roma is a victory points game based on a complex worker placement mechanism. Euro games have weights, and I’m not going to lie, Ave Roma is so heavy it could well have its own gravitational pull. There are upsides and downsides to this – the upside is that there’s lots of ways to win so it’s never too clear who’s in the best position at any one time. The downside is that learning the game is an absolute bitch.
Each player starts the game with an identical 10 card deck (unless you are playing with the hero packs) and share an 80 card market deck. During a player’s turn, they will be playing cards from their hand to either attack their opponent or purchase cards from the central market. If you’ve ever played a deck building game before (and especially if you’ve played Star Realms), the mechanics will be quite familiar. The goal in Hero Realms is to reduce your opponent’s life to zero.
In Food Truck Champion, each player is the owner of a food truck out to make a name for themselves. As the owner, you will be hiring staff, taking orders and preparing meals… all with the goal of earning awards and increasing your popularity.
As you complete orders, you will earn the right to expand different areas of your food truck, giving you much more flexibility. At the end of the game, the truck owner with the most popularity is the winner.
In Sorcerers’ Skirmish, players will take turns drawing, declaring, casting and resolving spell cards. Each sorcerer’s deck has identical elemental spells but how each player uses their deck is key. Aside from their spells, players should also use any other means to win. Players can count cards, bluff, use logic and hopefully have some luck on their side to be crowned the winner!
A boat race along a pre-Columbian Amazon is the setting for this version of Carcassonne. As players place tiles and use meeples to claim locations, they will also be moving a boat down the great Amazon river with the aim of scoring enough points from villages, tributaries, jungles with animals, and maintaining a lead in a river race.
In Oceanos, you’ll play as a submarine captain rushing out to explore the ocean for fun and profit.
You start with a basic submarine – a single periscope to find your way, a small aquarium to store fish specimens, a diver for treasure collection, and a little extra fuel.
The Flow of History is a card based game that has players guiding their respective civilizations from the agrarian age to the modern. Whoever has accumulated the most culture by game’s end will be the winner. But before learning how the game plays, it’s important to know a couple of things about the cards themselves.
There are six types of cards categorized by color. Whenever you gain a card you will add it to a stack in front of you arranged by type/color. Each card will have at least one production symbol on it as well as an effect written out in the middle. When a new card is placed over an existing one, it will overwrite the previous effect, but leave the production symbols showing.
Every player starts with a single card in their civilization and 4 resource tokens. The rest of the cards are placed in a deck arranged by ages. Cards are drawn off the deck and placed in the middle of the table to comprise the market. Players take turns taking a single action until the deck is depleted. Whoever has accumulated the most culture at this time will be the winner.
Citadels is ostensibly a city-building game because you earn points by building city districts, represented by cards. The goal is to have the most points when you or someone else builds eight districts (seven with 4-8 players in the new edition), triggering the last round of the game. You start with four of these and a couple gold. Each turn you either take two gold or draw two district cards, adding one of them to your hand. Normally, you may build one district each turn by paying the cost indicated on the card, which is also its point value. You can nab bonus points by building the maximum number of districts, owning at least one of the five different kinds of districts (noble, religious, trade, military and unique) and finally with certain unique district cards.
Broken Legions is a ‘warband’ style of skirmish game, so players will each need a warband of between 7 and 12 models a side. Since the game is set in a mythical Ancient Rome timeline, warbands consist of miniatures from the armies of the time: Imperial Rome, Gladiators, Barbarians, Dacians, Parthians, Argonauts (Greeks) and Cult of Set (Egyptians). Most of these miniatures you will find in any 28mm Ancient army that you may have to hand, or maybe one that has been lying in a corner unloved since its days of playing WAB?
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