We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

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

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

Shamans is a trick taking hidden role point scoring game that uses a mixture of success and failure in suit matching to either help the Shamans restore harmony to the world or allow the Shadows to win through.  My recent endeavour with Brian Boru piqued my interest in the trick taking side of things, and so I was cautiously optimistic about what Shamans was likely to be bringing to the table. I've never entirely got on with the hidden role type of game though, and only because it requires a certain type of person to play them with and get something out of it. You need more than just the mechanical aspect of a hidden role in order for it to really shine as it usually requires scheming over and above the regular mechanics. Every round you'll be playing cards that either match the lead suit or defy it and move the ominous Shadow pawn towards the end of the track and therefore win the round. Cards that are played that don't match the lead suit are played into their world areas

Almadi is all about a Sultan wanting his trusted advisers to build the new realm of Almadi in order to honour his wife Sheherazade. Now it doesn't use the word Grand Vizier, but I guess everyone kind of skirts around using that job title. 'Oh, you're the sultans chief advisor? Oh, but you're not Grand or the Vizier? But what about that snake staff you have? Or the wonderful eyeliner? Or the talking parrot? Oh, you want me to go away? Ok..'  So let's just leave it that you're important in a not-usurping-the-throne kind of way, definitely not an architect of destruction and you're certainly not seeking the diamond in the rough to find some dirty lamp you can give the once over to.  Almadi is all about the tile laying and planning. It's a game that rewards the final game state rather than a points as you go Euro and so your aim is to lay tiles into a form that groups tiles together, or has them linked in a way that you score the maximum number of points

Stop being clever. Taking that into account, sometimes all I want is a game that is solid and bloody well good at what it does. Others throw at you what looks like an inaccessible pile of nonsense that baffles, while you try to translate what is on the table from the rulebook that is so much many confusion. I'm tired of innovation for innovation's sake. It happens you see. When we get a shiny new exciting genre, or an old genre that gains a bit of popularity and its taken and copied and then others take what they think are the fundamentals of what makes something fun. They twist it a bit too far and they mess it up and you're left with a tuna and banana pizza with a chocolate orange stuffed crust. If any one of you reading this thinks that sounds like a good idea, then I'm afraid I have to come after you. It's the rules you see. 'There's no need to apologise' is the first thing I mutter when I look over the rulebook for Demeter from Sorry We Are French,

In the situation where some kind of natural disaster strikes, I'm going to be one of the discovered poor souls that got burnt / drown / cooked / cannibalised to death. I can't be bothered with the thought of being the plucky survivor, ending up meeking out some kind of living on the scraps of humanity. If the zombie apocalypse turned up, I'd be out there arms outstretched waiting to be bitten, I'm getting my tan in the nuclear fire. I've never been on Five Games for Doomsday because my answer to the question is "I'm probably already dead Ben to be frank, you c*nt".  Which takes me to Hellapagos, a shipwrecked with castaways survival game where within the first five minutes, I've already walked out in to the deep blue tide and taken in a lungful, while sticking the finger up to those trying to make a fishing net out of their left shoe and recent pinned tweet. Without microwave or confirmation of dairy and gluten free options I'm pretty much a de