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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

Small Islands Review - Lucky Duck Games

The name Small Islands will come to be a name that is loathed across the the board game world. Not that it does anything wrong. It's not the colourful illustrations by Aurelie Guarino, for they make the game pop on the table. It's not the quality of the components that are like little trinkets sitting on your table. It's the the fact that Alexis Allard wants you to break convention with your gaming habits. Teasing you with the game name and forcing you to go against what one hundred other games want you to do every time.   At the beginning it seems business as usual, there are tiles that make up parts of islands, there are super cute little Clan houses that each player will have to place on the created islands as you go, and even smaller and cuter bonus tokens that you can use in order to help you add additional natural resource tokens to the island and help you to score when things become a bit tricky with the tiles that have been played. A pile of tiles form the navigatio

A Very Merry Christmas: Dissent Games Solo Greetings cards

Dissent Games have come up with an interesting idea and one that I’ve not come across before, solo games on greetings cards. I really like the idea, for one, of a card that doesn’t go straight in the bin post birthday/Christmas/anniversary etc etc, and secondly of a little, quick game you can play in a few spare minutes. Plastic Currents is a very attractive card, having a Japanese Coy Carp pond look, which when buying a card is important. Game play involves attempting to remove plastic, represented by tokens or sweets, from the squares on the card through the rolling of dice. I’m going to be honest it took a couple of read throughs of the rules to double check that I’d got them straight. As someone brought up playing solitaire and patience endlessly, the quiet repeated actions didn’t bother me and I found it quite mindful attempting to clear columns. My one criticism is that there isn’t a scoring process; I would have like a “complete in x moves and you’re David Attenborough on Boaty

Buffet Brawl Card Game / Is That Banana Loaded? Expansion Review

Sometimes you crave the simplicity of just being able to jump to a game and get playing, not having to worry about spending ages setting up and learning, relearning, reading and rereading until you decide to leave things until another time. While I enjoy the delightful chase of having a mechanic click, or taking the starting steps to consider moves ahead and strategy, I also have absolutely never an issue with playing something shallow and positively silly, something to pass the time and in the current circumstances, something that won't have the other players waiting for 30 minutes while I go through the set up and explain fifteen rules at them all at once, watching their eyes glaze over. Doug Edwards is trying his best to bring to your table games that are extremely simple to learn and play, to the point where they have their own endearing charm. Buffet Brawl is a simple set collection / take that game where the idea is to gather enough food cards to give yourself enough higher v

Last Resort Tabletop Simulator First Look Preview

I played with virtual pieces,  The Games' called Last Resort,  A Vacation, No screaming  Don't really care if I'm winning or losing, how about we just forget about trying to make up a board game preview based on a very angry song which kind of had a rather cool video and instead think about going into space, and not only going into space, but maybe getting involved in vacations. So I give you Last Resort from Braincrack Games, and because we're so super switched and modern and into space age tech, it means that Lewis from Braincrack was able to give us a spin on the old Tabletop Simulator to show us how the game works.  So treat this as a kind of holiday timeshare pitching deal, where I'm going to let you sit back and imagine all those things you would want to see if you were looking at the deep cold dark haunting depths of space and think, yeah, I could run some bad ass space place here. The National Office of Space Exploration Yields is selling off some promising

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

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