We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

Like an evenings entertainment in front of your favourite streaming channel, where you've decided to hit on the the 'Play me Something' button and you're not sure of what the next hour or two is going to unfold. You know the theme is MURDER but you have no iota of a clue as how how things will play out as you pick up the deck of cards and lay out the first nine in a three by three grid, forming a picture of a scene. On the screen this scene would be busy with forensics and police milling about, looking for items to investigate. On the table in front of you, this is almost a snap shot. A point frozen in time where you can see a tragedy unfold in front of you. You need to make the decision where in the picture you are looking to zoom into and which card is going to be deftly picked up, turned over, and voice it's choices to us.  Crime Zoom is like a chose your own adventure in card form, and you can see why Lucky Duck Games have partnered with Aurora to bring it to us

We were provided a credit in order to purchase a Pre-printed coloured mini from Hero Forge.  For many, the months of lockdown offered a different way to play. For those who were raiding dungeons or navigating dusk filled night skies it meant moving from gathering round a table with a screen covered DM at the end of the table, to individually gathering online through Zooms and Whizzes and Roll20s ,while still trying to act like there was team work and togetherness and the camaraderie you had come to expect. Avatars moved from being present on the table to being virtual properties moved as if by magic by an unseen hand.  Virtual characters mean bigger possibilities in terms of character design, and with the popularity of Tabletop Simulator allowing role players to take their characters virtually into their adventure world, the opportunities for businesses to offer services in this field has grown dramatically. One of the main players in the last five years has been in the form of Hero Fo

 This is a guest post written by Jeff Hurcomb, we were not paid to post this article. The thoughts expressed here do not represent the views of the We're Not Wizards Team.                                              “Some people dream of success while others wake up and work hard at it.” I’m a guy that loves a good quote and it took me a while to pick what quote I thought best summed up this guest post, but this really nails it because I will be discussing a topic I haven’t been able to find posted anywhere else. Getting over your Kickstarter not being funded. Anybody that has ever launched a Kickstarter knows the feeling. That feeling you get as your cursor hovers over the launch button to make your campaign live and give you 30 days to make your dream become a reality. There are already thousands of posts about how to create a successful campaign and hundreds more about how to re-launch your campaign if it doesn’t get backed, but there is nothing regarding getting over the em

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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