We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

Jay Cormier is owner operator of Off The Page Games, known for Harrow County, Mind MGMT but has also been involved in the design of over a dozen other games.  Jay also designed the Fail Faster Playtesting Journal which is available on the Game Crafter:  https://www.thegamecrafter.com/parts/fail-faster-playtesting-journal We also chat about his experience on filming a new Board game comedy show and how he is supporting new designers with Fail Faster and his recent The Pitch Project.  You can follow Jay and his Antics  https://twitter.com/bamboozlebros      https://twitter.com/failfasterjay  https://offthepagegames.com/  https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/20990/jay-cormier 

Straight out the box Galileo Project makes no apologies for its attempt to be bold and brash when it hits your table. The main board will take up a decent amount of space lengthways, filling up spaces with cards and wooden tokens. Player boards shout at your with their Galilean moons of Jupiter. Multicolour disks and tokens sit out on the table ready to be moved and placed and in the middle of it all a rectangular box contains a treasure of poker chips. These megacredits have a reassuring tactile weight in your hand and you'll be forgiven if you spend more time flexing them between your fingers than you will having them simply sitting their placid on your spot on the table.  Galileo is all about the points. Building up an engine that slowly increases the power at your hands to create and develop on the four moons of Jupiter using a mixture of human specialists and machines. As the development of the moons grow, so does your abilities when you do take a turn, leading up to a points

It has certainly been the season for bright and colourful number based games. First we had the gentle and muted but highly brain bending Hiroba, a Sudoku mechanical machine of gardens and carp. Now we have the quite frankly fabulous technicoloured glory of Pearladora. Which is like mixture of squares and battleships, where the true value of your diver is hidden from prying eyes until the very end of the game.  Squares is a game I played as a kid, where you would draw out a grid made of dots and then take turns to try to create squares by drawing one line at a time to create a full square that you would gleefully embellish with your initial. In Pearladora, you're trying to place down lines in order to carve out territories and place numbered divers in order to win those areas and claim the cache of pearls for your own team. Moves are simple, you're either going to place a diver with a number in order to try to claim an area of the ocean or you're going to place up to two pon

  Without further ado, here are the top 12 games for 2022 that we covered and reviewed in the last 12 months. Not all the games were released this year and technically, one of them was reviewed on literally the last day of last year. But, ma hoose, ma rules. Will this list make a huge difference to a companies sales? Will they take to the streets to tell everyone that their game made a certain non-wizard happy? Are they looking for a special badge to add to their box the next printing? Probably no on all counts. But I wanted to say thank you to everyone on this list who provided me with many hours of entertainment.                                                         12. Horizon Zero Dawn  - Steamforged Games "For all the things I wanted it be, it manages to deliver on what it is, which is a highly effective deck building combat hybrid. There’s Horizon Zero Fat on this game. It plays well as a serious of calculated moments and my other criticisms aside, it brings the hunt..&q

You all remember Wordle. Do you remember Wordle? For a time it was the morning cup of coffee staple before everyone jacked themselves into the online work environment at nine a.m. People loved and still love it so much, that a major national newspaper paid the designer of the game a hefty sum to have it appear on their website. Now of course it's maybe not as popular in public but I'm sure it still very much has its fans guessing away and cursing when badly spelled US word came up. (ITS NOT COLOR) Before Wordle, the last big thing I remember was Sudoku, a game that had been quietly bubbling away from the 19th century to it's renaming in Japan and subsequent feature in a British newspaper in 2004. The public loved its simplicity and complexity, how it could be both very accessible and almost code breaking cryptic should the need arise. Sudoku is still very much a thing, and such is the essence if its purity that trying to create something based on those extremely strong foun

Sometimes in the world of board game reviewing you get Déjà vu, where you get the distinct feeling that you've gone through similar mechanics or similar moves very recently as you start to learn and play a new game. Sometimes it comes at the detriment of the newer game as you can end up subconsciously comparing if the new game does certain things better or worse. Other times it makes learning the newer game a much simpler prospect, as the base mechanics are already there even if the components and art bears no similarity. You know neither game influenced the other and the shared mechanics are pure coincidence but it's interesting to see how theme can play such an important role in helping to shape your end opinion of a game. I had this recently after playing Keystone North America over the last couple of weeks having recently reviewed Village Rails. Two completely different looking games that shared some common mechanical similarities.  Keystone North America comes from the min

Some games need the players to sing, whether your are in the realms of social deduction of the likes of Werewolf or Coup or even on a family throw down of Uno. The game has the base mechanics to make it work, but what is going to make it shine is the level of interaction between the players and how they add that little grain of sand that will eventually become a pearl. It's such a difficult thing to achieve perfectly that some of the most complicated games I have played actively discouraged direct communication or interaction in favour of heads down and numbers up. In my opinion, it takes a bit of courage to put a game out there that relies on it.  Which takes us to Langskip from Crab Studios, in which as a Viking that fell in battle, you've ended up in Helheim by mistake and need to use a mixture of bluffing and card play in order to make the climb to Valhalla. The rules are fairly simple, you have two cards dealt to you plus an all important reference card. On your turn, you&

There's a reasonable number of things going on in Wormholes from AEG. When I saw the game was designed by Peter McPherson of Tiny Towns fame, I kind of mistakenly thought that it might just be a spiritual successor, a kind of spatial spatial puzzle set in space. You get the idea. These things kind of concern me most of the time, as they can often end up looking like just a reskinned mechanical expansion. But Peter is a smart man and I was wrong to assume that he would take such a simple route. This to me could be seen as his second attempt to keep me impressed and continue to make my eyes light up when I know I'm getting the chance to play one of his wares.  Wormholes is like one of those vast videogame RPGs, without actually being an huge videogame RPG. It goes from being the beginning of a videogame RPG where you are trekking everywhere on foot, to being one of those RPGs where you have have vast control of the map and can zip about places to your hearts content, jumping from

I imagine that in the big game production line, when they are putting together the different types of games on the conveyor belt, there are a range of jars that hang overhead, each with a different flavour ready to be dispensed and sprinkled onto the box below. Some of the games are sprinkled with cuteness, others with horror. Some are covered in the Sci-Fi and space dust. On others the dust is crunchy and some it's simply a sweetener to make things go down easily. Sometimes the jar misfires and the dust floats down but doesn't quite take and other times there's an abundance with drowns the poor game in just a little bit too much flavour. With Achroma from Realm Runner Studios, you get the feeling that they made sure that their series of games were stopped right under the Charm jar, because as soon as you start to open the box and gaze on the first couple of cards, you can't help but smile. There's a huge amount of Studio Ghibli that resonates from the cards as you