We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

Oh Karak! You lay bare your gifts with your surprise card dungeon tiles and unexpected treasures in locked chests that need keys to fought for. You had players roaming as chosen heroes collecting swords and daggers and all the time wondering if the next draw from the bag is going to be the very dragon that you have to defeat in order to win the game. You bring special skills and dice rolling and indented character boards with slots for keys and life hearts with pain on the opposite side. Oh Karak! With your standees with small character art and bigger character cards with cryptic symbols that tell me sometimes everything about a character and nothing at the same time. You leave me pondering the rule book to figure out how I should be tackling the confusing and very similar dungeon. Watching me and my fellow explorers making the path ahead and passing through teleports and healing fountains but always stopping after our fourth action. Unless of course we end up doing something other tha

Shamans is a trick taking hidden role point scoring game that uses a mixture of success and failure in suit matching to either help the Shamans restore harmony to the world or allow the Shadows to win through.  My recent endeavour with Brian Boru piqued my interest in the trick taking side of things, and so I was cautiously optimistic about what Shamans was likely to be bringing to the table. I've never entirely got on with the hidden role type of game though, and only because it requires a certain type of person to play them with and get something out of it. You need more than just the mechanical aspect of a hidden role in order for it to really shine as it usually requires scheming over and above the regular mechanics. Every round you'll be playing cards that either match the lead suit or defy it and move the ominous Shadow pawn towards the end of the track and therefore win the round. Cards that are played that don't match the lead suit are played into their world areas

SteamForged have always been on my radar since the days of the Dark Souls Board Game, which in my mind was always going to be a near impossible task to please the fan base. How can you ever compete with the glory and gameplay that exists within someone's head? The trouble with IPs is that you get a licence for them because they have a fanbase. In doing so you then have to live up to the expectations of that same fan base. You can imagine that even if you did the perfect iteration that 98% of people loved, you would still get the comments from B1gG35TFANN419 about what really non important bit you missed out on in the gameplay videos on YouTube. I admire Steamforged alone for that, putting themselves to the be the sacrificial lambs of taking that risk with those characters and pushing through, regardless of the limitations and never letting their heads drop down. Then we come to Godtear, that doesn't have the slightest hint of connection to any kind of se

I think there should be an exclamation mark at this point, maybe even two but definitely one. It should be OverDrive! maybe even OVERDRIVE!! I'm currently still considering whether to deface the box with some coloured crayon. You see OverDrive is a half time show spectacle of a game that slots in between the main Dreadball games in the Mantic Universe, it deserves a bit of shouting but I'm not sure how much at this point. I've got a soft spot for Mantic. I like how they just get on with their games, don't come round your house and drink your expensive coffee and take three gluten free biscuits when you offer them two. When you play their games you kind of get the feeling that they really like what they do and they want you to know how much they like what they are doing.  OverDRIVE! isn't meant to be narratively about good versus bad or even Good Versus Bad. In fact OVerdriVE is all about being a leftover from the main Dreadball circuit, a has-been shunted off to the

There are few things that you can claim to be truly at the beginning of. I was there when I first saw and heard the Robots in Disguise, and those cartoons days when the Ark landed on Earth and Optimus Prime promised to protect the humans from the Decepticons. They were expensive toys and difficult to get hold of. We were living in the dawn of 'must haves' and forced shortages to create demand after the riots of the Cabbage Patch Dolls. I remember one of the spoiled kids at school (whose parents swapped actually giving a shit for lavish toys) proudly declaring he had managed to get both Megatron and Optimus Prime as toys and we jointly envied and hated him in one sitting. He used it as a bargaining chip to decide who his friends were and who were allowed to see his prize possessions. So we took a number and waited our turn, and eventually I got a chance to see what the fuss was about. While Optimus was cool, Megatron was the one I liked. He just looked cooler and shinier and he

Almadi is all about a Sultan wanting his trusted advisers to build the new realm of Almadi in order to honour his wife Sheherazade. Now it doesn't use the word Grand Vizier, but I guess everyone kind of skirts around using that job title. 'Oh, you're the sultans chief advisor? Oh, but you're not Grand or the Vizier? But what about that snake staff you have? Or the wonderful eyeliner? Or the talking parrot? Oh, you want me to go away? Ok..'  So let's just leave it that you're important in a not-usurping-the-throne kind of way, definitely not an architect of destruction and you're certainly not seeking the diamond in the rough to find some dirty lamp you can give the once over to.  Almadi is all about the tile laying and planning. It's a game that rewards the final game state rather than a points as you go Euro and so your aim is to lay tiles into a form that groups tiles together, or has them linked in a way that you score the maximum number of points

Stop being clever. Taking that into account, sometimes all I want is a game that is solid and bloody well good at what it does. Others throw at you what looks like an inaccessible pile of nonsense that baffles, while you try to translate what is on the table from the rulebook that is so much many confusion. I'm tired of innovation for innovation's sake. It happens you see. When we get a shiny new exciting genre, or an old genre that gains a bit of popularity and its taken and copied and then others take what they think are the fundamentals of what makes something fun. They twist it a bit too far and they mess it up and you're left with a tuna and banana pizza with a chocolate orange stuffed crust. If any one of you reading this thinks that sounds like a good idea, then I'm afraid I have to come after you. It's the rules you see. 'There's no need to apologise' is the first thing I mutter when I look over the rulebook for Demeter from Sorry We Are French,

In the situation where some kind of natural disaster strikes, I'm going to be one of the discovered poor souls that got burnt / drown / cooked / cannibalised to death. I can't be bothered with the thought of being the plucky survivor, ending up meeking out some kind of living on the scraps of humanity. If the zombie apocalypse turned up, I'd be out there arms outstretched waiting to be bitten, I'm getting my tan in the nuclear fire. I've never been on Five Games for Doomsday because my answer to the question is "I'm probably already dead Ben to be frank, you c*nt".  Which takes me to Hellapagos, a shipwrecked with castaways survival game where within the first five minutes, I've already walked out in to the deep blue tide and taken in a lungful, while sticking the finger up to those trying to make a fishing net out of their left shoe and recent pinned tweet. Without microwave or confirmation of dairy and gluten free options I'm pretty much a de