We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

Delighted to be joined by Elizabeth Hargrave to talk about Trick or Treating, foraging, the perils of Mushroom club, and of course, UnderGrove which is their new game coming to Kickstarter. Details below.  Links of Note  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alderac/undergrove-designed-by-elizabeth-hargrave-and-mark-wootton   https://www.elizhargrave.com/ https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/111338/elizabeth-hargrave https://www.instagram.com/elizharg https://www.alderac.com/undergrove/   https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376740/undergrove   ========================================================= If you would like to support us then please visit and interact with the links below.  Please give us a rating or review on your podcast catcher of choice.  Also, please let someone else know about our show, as recommendations are wonderful things. OUR LINKS OF NOTES ( https://linktr.ee/werenotwizards ) Apple Podcasts    |   Our Blog, Reviews, Previews and Thoughts  |  Our YouTube Cha

  You know what they say, you don't see a mechanic for some time and then all of a sudden two games appear at once, thrusting their bags in your face and asking you to take a dive of luck into the velveteen darkness and fumble around hoping that you're grabbing something useful.  Overview Meeples & Monsters is a bag building meeple based game. So as your turns progress you'll be trying to upgrade the quality of the meeple resources you have while trying not to dilute your own supply too much that your end up continually drawing the weaker components.  Mainplay Each player is in charge of their own personal meeple army that they will aim to try to enrich over a series of rounds by constructing buildings in the small city of Rowan. The first phase is either about construction or upgrading the existing units that you own to access special abilities that some of the units offer. Every player starts off with a generous number of peasants that have a basic attack value and as

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

There's always that slight silence across the table as the die slowly clatter to their rest. You may not like dice games for their randomness, but you certainly can't fault them for the amount sheer suspense and excitement that they bring to the table. For everyone I know who hates the addition of rolling cubes, there's someone else cheering them on and joyously adding another game the their collection. They are the embodiment of anticipation and for most of us our first foray into board games was based around some kind of dice rolling mechanic and so like most nostalgia, we either look back fondly or cringe that we ever enjoyed something so crass in the first place.  Cubitos not only wants you to roll dice, it wants you to roll lot of dice. It would honestly like you to be swimming about in dice like Scrooge McDuck if it had its way with you, spitting out dice in a cascade while you did the backstroke. And while you are doing this, it would like you very much to race aroun

This review is based on the final retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. I've been hearing about Point Salad for some time, which is mainly down to the prolific streaming shows from AEG over the last year. When faced with the loss of the face to face plays offered through game nights and conferences AEG took to Twitch with gusto and started to show off many games from its back catalogue. As streaming grew more popular, I saw others play together, and Point Salad came up again and again as something that encouraged conversation but wasn't too heavy on the admin that the players would become lost in the rounds themselves and forget the audience around them.  From the off, you can see why it would be billed as a crowd pleaser. It's bright and it creates a joy presence on the table, with garish colo

As I look through my collection in the cupboard as I write this, I'm thinking that giving something a theme is maybe one of the easiest things to bestow upon some cardboard. It is all about art and tokens, and representation through the mechanics. And as long as there is enough of a tie in, then you'll just about get away with it. We've all spent time playing games where the theme was there, sitting at the table beside you, steadily getting more embarrassed as it realised that actually, it might have not bothered sitting down, as no one would have missed it if it never bothered its arse turning up. It doesn't effect the fun time had, but you could have still had that time without the need to think you were a pirate. In other games the theme takes you to a different level, almost making you live in the moment and for that briefest of seconds, the table falls away, and you're standing there. Then the game has clutched you in its hand, and it's slowly squeezin