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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

Merv: The Heart of The Silk Road - Board Game Review - Osprey Games

First of all a huge apology. I've had Merv sit on my shelf for far too long, and while it's bright colours and enticing presentation was shouting at me to get it to the table, the number of times I've sat there with the board set out in front of me trying to make things click or even put things together, only to give in and put it all back in the box again. It wasn't even a Merv thing,  it's a brain thing I think, and whether it is an age thing or just an intelligence thing, it still leaves me in the situation where Merv was sitting there undeservedly not played looking unhappy and brightly coloured. So sorry. I should have written this a long time ago, and so I'll try to make it up to you.  Secondly, regarding how Merv looks, Ian O'Toole has created something that looks wonderful on the table. Bright colours and subtle colour palettes merge together on the table to make something that the boardgame Instagram crowd will buy just to be able to take pretty pic

Juicy Fruits Board Game Review - PSC Games / Deep Print Games

I like to play, play, play, play. Play board games with apples and bananas. I like to pley, pley, pley, pley. Pley boerd gemes with epples and benenes I like to pliy, pliy, pliy, pliy. Pliy boird gimes with ipples and bininis I like to ploy, ploy, ploy, ploy. Ploy boord gomes with opples and bononos I like to pluy, pluy, pluy, pluy. Pluy bourd gumes with upples and bununus So in the first instance you're wondering what's going on because it seems like things are fairly complicated. It's only when you start to look for the patterns that you realise you're just following some simple rules that you're building up on as you go. You can easily continue with rules if you want or you can maybe change a few things to make it even more interesting. At least you won't feel the fear of a huge learning curve towering over you. After all, this is just simple with added sprinkles.  Christian Stohr wants you to learn to play a Euro without really getting you to play a Euro unt

Oink Games Review: Dokojong, In a Grove and Moon Adventure

As a big fan of Deep Sea Adventure I was excited to see Oink games latest Kickstarter and happily backed and received Dokojong, In a Grove and Moon Adventure. Its fair to say that Oink Games have cornered the market in sleek, smart, tiny pocket games. Dokojong Dokojong is a 2-5 player game in which you are trying to hide your beloved dog from the other players while trying to find your opponent’s dog. At its heart this is a bluffing game. Five doors are laid out in the centre of the table which correspond to five tiles held by each player, four of which have crosses and one of which is your dog. Players take it in turns to suggest a door to open, refuse an offer and suggest different doors (having to increase the number offered by one), open a door directly that they think an opponent’s dog is hidden behind, or accept a search of the suggested doors. If your dog is found you take a penalty (three penalties loses you the game); if you successfully hide your dog by revealing three cros

Holmes: Sherlock and Mycroft Review - Kosmos Games

A hundred yard stare. That's what you notice. It's only for the briefest period of time, but if you could look behind the eyes then you would see what looks like things clicking into place, like a sideways cutaway diagram of a key sliding into a lock with all the clues aligning to give the final answer. The solution to the case. You feel like while their eyes are staying still, the eyes are taking everything in, missing nothing. So help you if you've said something out of place, or sat the wrong way, or tried to swallow down those guilty thoughts. A hundred yard stare, into the very depths of what will make you declare your guilt. So breathe in gently and wait for them to finish their thoughts. You know you're not guilty, you're not even capable of such a deed unless it was something that really needed doing. So stare back and let them take the measure of you. Let them look. Someone has bombed the Houses of Parliament. So let them take all the time in the world.  No

Wizard Miners Kickstarter Preview - Petro Gaming Group

I've always insisted that the most difficult thing about starting anything is actually just getting on and doing it and then accepting that your first attempt at anything is going to be pretty terrible. Take the beginning of this review. I've done everything tonight from watch crap telly to take the dog out in the garden for an emergency pee. I've boiled the kettle some umpteen times and threatened to make myself a coffee countless times which I abandoned when it became far too late. I've written and rewritten some kind of clever arsed intro in the hope that you get dragged into reading to the end and consider finding out more about Wizard Miners. However, now we're here and I think we're almost at the end of the first paragraph and you're still wondering how the hell we can even begin to link this in to talk about the game.  It's not a good start and I'm hoping you accept it. I'm hoping you can see past the shaky paragraph structure and word cou

Blitzkrieg Board Game Review Including Nippon Expansion - PSC Games - Including New Edition

I'm a bit of a doer when it comes to learning games. As I get older, I find my ability to read through a swathe of information, retain it and then put it into practice becomes more difficult. I find myself second guessing more and more. And more often, I end up learning 'on the job' with the pieces laid out in front of me. It means that most of my first games can be labelled as messy endeavours, and I'm not actually switching the fun switch on sometimes until the second game, but as I get more involved in the critiquing of games, I become very aware I'm assessing learning the game as part of the overall process. Fun with bucket loads of additional work can be as tiring as a day job, and sometimes I want the simple immediacy of entertainment now. So there are many things that are attractive to me when it comes to looking at a game as the likes of Blitzkrieg from PSC Games. The box itself is emblazoned with a bold claim of being able to experience World War Tw

Super Truffle Pigs- Games By Bicycle - Kickstarter Board Game Preview

I have an expectation that as someone who can play board games with my kids. If I play things right then I'm pretty much future proofing my chance to guarantee I'm always going to have someone who will sit with me at the table and play all of the games. I'm not expecting to jump into a Turczi rules fest as soon as they get to the age of eight, but it would be nice to know that I'm not just waiting for that next game night to get something meatier to the table. The truth of the matter is that mass market board games often treat our children like they are idiots that only know how to roll dice and move pieces. The actual reality being that kids grow out of board games because they struggle to be challenging, and therefore struggle with the balance of fun confusing simplicity as a good direction to follow.  It doesn't have to be this way. The Dark Imp have proved time and time again to me that kids games can be brain burners, like Doughnut Dash with it's programmin

Imperium Classics Card Game Review - First Thoughts - Osprey Games

Imperium Classics is the granola of deck building games. Further more, Imperium Classics is the "fruits of the forest" granola cereal killer of a breakfast of deck building games, that demand you see it through with little or no mercy. Crunchy and occasionally overwhelming, with hints of fruity sharpness. Imperium has a need for you to stop for a minute and chew energetically in the hope that you'll be able to digest it. It's the deck builder that you think in the long term will be good for you if you can just persevere and keep chewing for that little bit longer. In all fairness while the first bowl will be a hard slog, and you may need to change spoons halfway through, ultimately this is the type of deck builder your civilisation itch has been looking to help it get thoroughly scratched.  Imperium Classics contains all these click moments. You can try to wade through the rules in order to get an understanding of what is in store for you, but the reality is that unti

Cubitos Board Game Review - Alderac Entertainment Group

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

Zuuli Card Game Preview - Unfringed

This is the pre-production version, so the art, rules and mechanics may be subject to change over the next couple of months. Therefore please treat this as a first thoughts piece, based on version of the game that we were provided with. We have not been paid for the preview. We also do not provide a full play by play explanation of the game, so not all mechanics may be mentioned in the preview. Sometimes when you get a game for an intended audience, its often better just to hand that game off to the intended recipients, lighting the blue touch paper and just stepping back. As someone who has reviewed close to over 100 games now, sometimes its not an entirely bad exercise to get someone you know who is slightly less experienced, to play the game first and give their viewpoint. So with a combination of the summer holidays and the arrival of Zuuli through the front door, it made perfect sense to hand it over to two of my children to see how they would fair.  In Zuuli, you're charged

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