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Divinus Board Game Review - Lucky Duck Games

Demigods eh? You think every thing is going well and life is nice and quiet, then all of a sudden you're reminded that you've actually got to go and prove yourself and show how powerful you are in order to ascend to some kind of Pantheon type thing. Well, in Divinus you need to. Now, I don't want you to cringe when I mention this game, but Divinus from Lucky Duck Games seems to have crawled from the same evolutionary pool as Charterstone. Now that might be enough to have some of you wince slightly but hang fire. I'm very aware that not everyone had the best time from that game and time has seen it as more an experiment in gameplay than a direction to forge ahead with. What if I said that Divinus also seems to have inherited its mother's love of Carcassonne. Does that make you feel any better? I hope so. I really do.  Divinus is another entry in the application based games that Lucky Duck Games are quietly and regularly producing from their studios. They seem to have

Vengeance Roll & Fight Part 2 Board Game Review - Mighty Boards

After a while you get to recognise a Turczi, whether it's the aroma when you first unwrap the packaging, the subtle hint of sarcasm in the box, or the rulebook that usually has the exceptionally small font, or the fact that the game itself is trying to push the genre just that little bit further. Here's someone who isn't willing to accept what others have done and just do their version of it. There seems to be an obsession from the man to push the envelope and get you thinking at the same time. I'm guessing if you look in his cupboards, the peanut butter is never smooth. That he cooks his veggies for 4 minutes instead of five, and you'll never catch him dunking his biscuits in his tea. Vengeance Roll & Fight is a roll a write that just like Rome & Roll (still the most stupid name in history of naming games) requires the use of dry wipe boards and gaining resources in order to carry out your actions to score points. Vengeance is closer to a dungeon crawler th

Village Rails Card Game Review - Osprey Games

So if I explain to you how the night went, then maybe it will give you some understanding as to why the initial impressions of Village Rails were maybe skewed in a certain direction. The game night started with a groups  introduction to Akropolis, which went down sweeter than a syrup covered jellyfish. Followed by the surprisingly simple but analysis paralysis inducing The King is Dead. In the case of both of these, at least one of us already knew how to play the game and were able to guide everyone else. When it came to Village Rails, we were approaching the end of the night, it was a new game to learn and even though we were in the 'game zone' we found our first experience to be a slightly bitty and a tiny bit overwhelming.  To be clear I'm not trying to be critical here, Village Rails is a deceitful little bugger. It arrives in a cute little box with a deck of cards, some cardboard markers and a twelve page teeny tiny rulebook. The rulebook is filled with diagrams and ex

Akropolis Board Game Review - Gigamic - Hachette Games

There's a skill to making a game as easy to play as possible. It is a road paved with traps and misdirection and distractions, where going down the wrong road can often lead to frustration, and in the worst case, a game not finding a way back to the table very soon. While I genuinely use my own opinions as the base for many reviews that I've produced in the last six years, when the people you are playing with are genuinely happy to have another round of a game with hesitation, you know that the designer must have succeeded in making huge inroads in making their effort accessibly playable.  Akropolis from Giga Mic wants you to get laying tiles as quickly as possible. There are no punchboards to fiddle with, the quarry tokens are already bagged up. The tiles have printed on the back the number of players they should be used for. The rulebook is simple and straightforward to read through and understand. In your turn you pick from one of line of tiles, with the price increasing as

Horizon Zero Dawn Board Game Review - Steamforged Games

  I'm a huge fan of the original Horizon Zero Dawn videogame. Its mixture of exploration, imagination and some of the most fun combat you could have cost me hours in leisure time. It was a game that I picked through in chunks, gasped at its breath taking set pieces and scenery, and enjoyed a story that while seemed far fetched, managed to be both full of heart and humanity and sold itself extremely well. How do you take a game that quite literally covered an area the size of a continent and make it something playable on some pressed and printed trees that sit on your table? You take the one of the core facets of the experience and hone it down into the one of the purest parts of the game. The hunt itself. One the things I enjoyed about the original game was the combat and how much it required planning ahead of the execution. With the number of resources and possible lines of attack you could take, often what you did before you notched that first arrow would often decide on how the

Andor - The Family Fantasy Game - Board Game Review - Kosmos Games

There is a difference, so give me a chance to explain. I can play a mechanically simple game, and as long it's solid but compelling then you can file such a title under the term of gateway game. It's a starter to an evening, or a quick half hour before you do something different. When it comes to games for younger children, there's the temptation to make them simple, horrifically colourful, easy to understand but not necessarily something that you'll be wanting to come back to again and again. Sometimes we wrongly assume that complicated means losing someone's attention, especially if it's coming from younger eyes. So we keep the mechanics dialed down, sometimes too much, and they end on the shelf, right next to the copy of Kids Cluedo and the Spiderman jigsaw puzzles.  Andor - The Family Fantasy Game gives some strong indicators that it might be lacking in confidence to push anything above a simple exploration game involving some fetch quests and a potential en

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