We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

Peer Sylvester wants to mess with your competitive head at the very base level when it comes to his latest game, Brian Boru, published by Osprey Games. Based around the adventures of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, who in the beginning of the year 1000 used both his might on the field and in the political landscape to unite the various regions under his control and dominance. You take up the task of trying to gain favour with the church, control towns, repel Vikings and even use marriage to unite everyone under your banner and win the game. Providing you have gained more points than anyone else.  On first impressions you have what appears to be the traditional multi-track Euro type set up, with areas for the Marriage track, Church and Viking parts of the game. There is the huge points track that circles the entire board, waiting for one of your cute wooden disks to take a wander around as you collect the spoils of your progress. Everything looks in an acceptable Euro style order and

You sit back slowly in your chair, and push the laptop slightly to one side and mutter 'It doesn't matter' under your breath, and that's maybe some kind of silly reassurance because at this point, at this particular point, it's the entire focus of everything and of course it matters. Otherwise why are you sitting up at 12.37am instead of going to bed, when you had promised yourself 49 minutes ago that you were better just leaving it to another time? The sensible head in you nodding like some kind of dog on the parcel shelf of a car, always there and definitely ignored. While the second guessing gnome just sits in the corner and laughs because you promised it would never get to this, it was always going to be fun.  It wasn't always like this, you were able to do five things at once, and everything wasn't easy but it definitely wasn't as hard as it is now. Everything seemed fresh and new and mistakes were all learning opportunities, never set backs. You la

When you finally sit back like Admiral Ackbar in The Return of the Jedi, realising that your work is done and you've nailed that mechanic in your game, playtesting it until you've refined and distilled it, so that all there now is wonderful purity of intention and execution. There's always the temptation to bloat things out, to add in those little extras to extend things just that little bit more for the sake of content. We've all played those games where you can see they gave into temptation, and the mechanical star of the show has grown arms and legs and while you're enjoying what's in front of you on the table, you can't help but thinking that it would be better with some of the fat trimmed away.    Whirling Witchcraft is a lean mixture of engine building and resource management, couple in with a neat overfill mechanic that has you directly influencing other players resources in order to score and win. You take the role of a witch, using various ingredien

Ten has a lot of promise from the outset. It's based on one of the gamblers core staples, the tense delicious and often painful game of 21 or Blackjack. Except the difference here is that you are not only trying not to bust over the that gateway number of Ten but you are also using the cards you gain to create runs in four different colours. Once the main deck is exhausted then points are tallied based on the runs achieved and the winner can be decided.  There's three types of cards in the deck, the normal value cards have a number and colour that you are trying to get runs with. The currency cards will award you with the associated amount of currency that can be used to purchase cards from the market. Wildcards will allow you to fill in spaces where you are missing all important numbers for your runs. When a Wildcard is drawn then play stops and an auction is held to decide who will win that card. Each player takes their turn to draw cards from deck and decide whether to conti