We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

The name Small Islands will come to be a name that is loathed across the the board game world. Not that it does anything wrong. It's not the colourful illustrations by Aurelie Guarino, for they make the game pop on the table. It's not the quality of the components that are like little trinkets sitting on your table. It's the the fact that Alexis Allard wants you to break convention with your gaming habits. Teasing you with the game name and forcing you to go against what one hundred other games want you to do every time.   At the beginning it seems business as usual, there are tiles that make up parts of islands, there are super cute little Clan houses that each player will have to place on the created islands as you go, and even smaller and cuter bonus tokens that you can use in order to help you add additional natural resource tokens to the island and help you to score when things become a bit tricky with the tiles that have been played. A pile of tiles form the navigatio

Dissent Games have come up with an interesting idea and one that I’ve not come across before, solo games on greetings cards. I really like the idea, for one, of a card that doesn’t go straight in the bin post birthday/Christmas/anniversary etc etc, and secondly of a little, quick game you can play in a few spare minutes. Plastic Currents is a very attractive card, having a Japanese Coy Carp pond look, which when buying a card is important. Game play involves attempting to remove plastic, represented by tokens or sweets, from the squares on the card through the rolling of dice. I’m going to be honest it took a couple of read throughs of the rules to double check that I’d got them straight. As someone brought up playing solitaire and patience endlessly, the quiet repeated actions didn’t bother me and I found it quite mindful attempting to clear columns. My one criticism is that there isn’t a scoring process; I would have like a “complete in x moves and you’re David Attenborough on Boaty

Sometimes you crave the simplicity of just being able to jump to a game and get playing, not having to worry about spending ages setting up and learning, relearning, reading and rereading until you decide to leave things until another time. While I enjoy the delightful chase of having a mechanic click, or taking the starting steps to consider moves ahead and strategy, I also have absolutely never an issue with playing something shallow and positively silly, something to pass the time and in the current circumstances, something that won't have the other players waiting for 30 minutes while I go through the set up and explain fifteen rules at them all at once, watching their eyes glaze over. Doug Edwards is trying his best to bring to your table games that are extremely simple to learn and play, to the point where they have their own endearing charm. Buffet Brawl is a simple set collection / take that game where the idea is to gather enough food cards to give yourself enough higher v

I played with virtual pieces,  The Games' called Last Resort,  A Vacation, No screaming  Don't really care if I'm winning or losing, how about we just forget about trying to make up a board game preview based on a very angry song which kind of had a rather cool video and instead think about going into space, and not only going into space, but maybe getting involved in vacations. So I give you Last Resort from Braincrack Games, and because we're so super switched and modern and into space age tech, it means that Lewis from Braincrack was able to give us a spin on the old Tabletop Simulator to show us how the game works.  So treat this as a kind of holiday timeshare pitching deal, where I'm going to let you sit back and imagine all those things you would want to see if you were looking at the deep cold dark haunting depths of space and think, yeah, I could run some bad ass space place here. The National Office of Space Exploration Yields is selling off some promising