Posts in Category: Board Games
Deduction, Confusion and Renaissance Masks
Social games often make players try to guess others’ hidden role while hiding or misrepresenting their own agenda. Mascarade, a card game featuring phenomenal art and great potential for laughter-inducing confusion, throws a wrench into this by making it so that you are not even sure what your role is. Bluffing, memory, deduction, luck and renaissance intrigue blend for fun that grows more hectic as the player count increases.
Yggdrasil review: Ragnarok and roll
Yggrdrasil is a barely pronounceable cooperative game set in the rich world of Norse mythology. The theme is well realized and the mechanics are inventive, yet the stuttering flow and over-reliance on chance holds the game back from true greatness. Despite its’ flaws, it is a challenging, compact game that will help you practice pronouncing the name of Thor’s hammer in advance of the next Avengers.
Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small – A big game in a small package
Creating a game that is short and simple, yet complex and rewarding is no easy fit. Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small carries a title that is a bit unwieldy and long but behind this deceptively awkward name hides a gem of a game that is tight, quick, challenging and makes you want to set up again as soon as you are done.
Scoundrels of Skullport: Dark Side of Waterdeep
Following up on the success of Lords of Waterdeep, Scoundrels of Skullport is a two-part expansion that increases the maximum number of players to 6 and offers very different ways to enhance the base game. One expansion, the Undermountain introduces increased use of intrigue cards as well as complex and extremely rewarding quests. The other, Skullport explores the darker side of the game and adds a key new element to the game – Corruption. While the quality of the two expansions is not even, the package as a whole provides a solid addition to the base Lords of Waterdeep making a great game even better.
Lords of Waterdeep: Worker Placement in City of Splendors
What happens when you combine a mechanic popular in dry economic resource management games and one of the most established settings for the geekiest game of them all – Dungeons & Dragons? Few could have predicted that the result will be such a light, welcoming and ultimately engrossing game as Lords of Waterdeep. Through beautifully intuitive graphic design and non-confrontational competition, this game earns high praise for strategy, replayability and most importantly – being a lot of fun.
Three reasons I have a man crush on Ignacy Trzewiczek
I have to admit – as a game designer and aspiring publisher – that I have a man-crush. The object of my admiration is Ignacy Trzewiczek and at this point I can almost spell out his last name without Google. Ignacy is behind such hit board games as Robinson Crusoe and Imperial Settlers and runs Portal Games from Poland. And today, being a good date because it is his birthday, I will tell you three good reasons why I feel this way.