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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

Caesar! Board Game Review - PSC Games

If you're going to come at me with your same size box as Blitzkrieg with the same type of exclamation mark as Blitzkrieg and then spout about doing something in 20 minutes then you better be damn sure those promises are made of solid brass. Those are bold claims considering how much I like Paolo Mori's previous 20 minutes of joy in a box. In fact, I've not only wrote about it once, I went back and added in some extra glitter when PSC release the special big box addition. So you better just not be someone else pretending to be Paolo Mori otherwise I'm going to have to punch you. I'm not joking here. If you're David Turczi in some kind of horrible face mask disguise then I'm going to be upset.  I adored Blitzkrieg! because its simple concept and execution meant that it could be actually played in twenty minutes, and due to the randomness of 'the bag', it meant that no two real games were the same. It was incredibly moreish, like some kind of board game

Brian Boru Review - First Impressions - Osprey Games

Peer Sylvester wants to mess with your competitive head at the very base level when it comes to his latest game, Brian Boru, published by Osprey Games. Based around the adventures of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, who in the beginning of the year 1000 used both his might on the field and in the political landscape to unite the various regions under his control and dominance. You take up the task of trying to gain favour with the church, control towns, repel Vikings and even use marriage to unite everyone under your banner and win the game. Providing you have gained more points than anyone else.  On first impressions you have what appears to be the traditional multi-track Euro type set up, with areas for the Marriage track, Church and Viking parts of the game. There is the huge points track that circles the entire board, waiting for one of your cute wooden disks to take a wander around as you collect the spoils of your progress. Everything looks in an acceptable Euro style order and

Burnout - A Tale of Trying to Be Everything Everywhere and Just being Tired Instead.

You sit back slowly in your chair, and push the laptop slightly to one side and mutter 'It doesn't matter' under your breath, and that's maybe some kind of silly reassurance because at this point, at this particular point, it's the entire focus of everything and of course it matters. Otherwise why are you sitting up at 12.37am instead of going to bed, when you had promised yourself 49 minutes ago that you were better just leaving it to another time? The sensible head in you nodding like some kind of dog on the parcel shelf of a car, always there and definitely ignored. While the second guessing gnome just sits in the corner and laughs because you promised it would never get to this, it was always going to be fun.  It wasn't always like this, you were able to do five things at once, and everything wasn't easy but it definitely wasn't as hard as it is now. Everything seemed fresh and new and mistakes were all learning opportunities, never set backs. You la

Whirling Witchcraft - Board Game Review - Alderac Entertainment Group

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 - The Card Game - Alderac Entertainment Group - Flatout Games

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

Crime Zoom - Bird of Ill Omen / His Last Card - Spoiler Free Review

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

Hero Forge Pre-printed Coloured Minis Review

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 Thing That We Call 'Failure' is Not The Falling Down, but the Staying Down. - Kickstarter Failure by Jeff Hurcomb

 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

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

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