We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

(SPOILER ALERT - this article will contain spoilers of Legacy games). When Legacy games burst onto the scene in 2011-12 with Risk: Legacy, the gaming world felt a seismic shift. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, legacy games are designed to be permanently changed through a series of sessions by the game play itself. Often this involves the removal or tearing up of cards, the ability to name character cards and make permanent positive or negative changes to them. Sometimes you'll go as far as changing the playing board, often through the use of stickers and writing on it, but it always involves changes to the rules which are revealed through each playing session. Risk and Pandemic (Season 1 and 2) have all of these elements. Like many others, my family played Risk from the earliest age (pretty sure I was 8 when I first played), and it’s the stated reason why a lot of those families and a lot of people in my family say that they don’t like boardgames. Who doesn’t remember the

Pandemic: State of Emergency 2-4 players Age 13+ Designed by Matt Leacock and Thomas Lehmann Published by Z-man Games My partner and I are huge fans of Pandemic, so much so that we took Pandemic Legacy Season 1 on honeymoon with us. We used to play it a couple of times a month and got pretty good. However, for whatever reason we haven’t played for a while. But with all this time on our hands we, maybe foolishly, decided to try State of Emergency. Pandemic is a co-op, action management game, where players use character cards with special abilities to try to cure 4 different diseases which are rapidly spreading across the world. The State of Emergency expansion increases the difficulty of the game by adding Emergency Event cards into the event deck, giving a nasty double whammy with the Epidemic cards. The Hinterlands extends the playing board and can be infected through the rolling of a dice and outbreak to connected cities, and the Superbug Challenge which we didn’t attempt. To mitigat

In space no one can hear you apply sun screen.. Apologies for the frankly dreadful attempt to start off a first thoughts piece for Dranda Games and their game Solar Storm. A disaster averting sun spot of an adventure where factor 50 isn't going to cut it and winding down the window to let in a breeze might just cause slight chafing or actually third degree burns. Though bad intros aside, what we have here is mixture of card game and resource management with a theme that places you in red alert, trying to avoid an impending disaster as you attempt to restart your stalled spaceship as it crashes towards the sun. The ship is represented by a 3 x 3 grid of cards with the energy core in the centre, awaiting patiently for the other surrounding cards to divert power to it so you can get the hell out of there and save your burning soul. Each card has three spaces to represent potential damage as well as information on what resources are required in order to both repair and send