We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

Nawalli creates a curiosity as soon as you have the box sitting in front of you. I'm so used to seeing dramatically overstated attraction artwork, that the colour scheme and simplicity of the Nawalli box was a refreshing change. When you remove the lid and start going through the cards I'll be surprised if you don't spend time appreciating the style of art on offer here. Nawalli's theme is based around traditional Aztec artwork which means you have extremely strong images and line work, strong colours that often clash with each other in a delightful way. The artwork and theme alone was enough to want me to see how this would play on the table.  Nawalli is a lane battler, along the same lines as Sol Forge, where you'll be playing Nawals into one of four lanes with the aim of trying to capture Tonalli gems. Gather thirteen and you'll win the game which differs it from the normal 'reduce the enemy down to zero'. It gives the potential for more of a tug of w

CLeM is gently unsettling from the very start. As you begin to explore the cartoon style mansion you find yourself in, you start off with only a diary with the word CLeM embossed on the front cover. You also don't seem to be human, instead you walk around the halls looking like some kind of sad sack cloth doll, mismatched eyes and slow of purpose. The only thing guiding you onwards is a voice making demands to be shown examples of various qualities, the first one being 'beauty'.  CLeM calls itself a 'Puzzlevania' which is meant to mean it mixes exploration and puzzle solving but also means that you unlock new tools as your progress to allow you to unlock previously inaccessible puzzles. In practice this means that as you explore the mansion you'll come across items that you can combine to create new tools to use in puzzles, like the lock pick (which gives you a very fun minigame to play). Some puzzles require you to combine items with the environment in order to

My writing is often scatter-brained without form or structure, a bundle of ideas stitched together, hopefully with a decipherable message. I hope they make sense and above all I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do writing. While writing is something I enjoy, I have never placed a huge amount of importance on anything I put out there. If it resonates with your own thoughts then wonderful. If it confirms that you made the right decision on a game you now own then I have done my job. At the same time, sometimes I need to warn you of pitfalls and issues that I see in a game. Sometimes this is a personal preference and sometimes it is because something I've played has left me frustrated and annoyed due to some poor choices. Hamlet is one of these games. It seems to want to be different for the sake of being different and it seems to blindly want to stick to its choices regardless of what expectations might be.  The central premise of the game is the construction of a church in o

I don't where to even start with this. The Name Trevor comes from a number of sources. In Welsh it derives from the words Homestead or Settlement (tre) and Big (fawr). So technically Bad Trevor means Bad Big House. It's ridiculous, silly and make no sense whatsoever. I've known a few Trevor's in my time. My dad had a work colleague called Trevor who was one of those people who I remember having pile and pile of pirated spectrum games. Whatever you wanted, he could get it for you. They didn't always work and often the tapes lasted all of ten goes before they refused to load at all, or were chewed up by the tape machine. When games cost you a huge amount of your pocket money, then Trevor was your man. He wasn't being bad, he was kind of sticking it to the man. Nine times out of ten, you ended up having to buy the games anyway, but it gave you the chance to try before you buy. Like Chuckie Egg 2.  Similarly, I used to work with a Trevor, and we even did a car shar

If Legends Untold was an aftershave, it would be a classic cologne from the late eighties, smelling slightly of cork and sandalwood. There's an unafraid aroma of nostalgia, because when you get down to brass tacks, this is a role playing game that is unapologetic in its approach and lives in its own vast world and its own little bubble, regardless of the changes and evolution that has occurred around it. On first appearances you would be mistaken to think that you're getting into some kind of dungeon crawler type game. You have character cards and equipment and modular maps that are explored. Once you start playing the game, it is actually more like a physical fleshed out RPG with all the various skill tests that come with the territory. You'll explore from card to card, but travel as an entire party, with guards and scouts who have differing jobs. Each area sits as individual little adventure. With a checklist of challenges that need to be overcome or dealt with depending