We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

  I'm a huge fan of the original Horizon Zero Dawn videogame. Its mixture of exploration, imagination and some of the most fun combat you could have cost me hours in leisure time. It was a game that I picked through in chunks, gasped at its breath taking set pieces and scenery, and enjoyed a story that while seemed far fetched, managed to be both full of heart and humanity and sold itself extremely well. How do you take a game that quite literally covered an area the size of a continent and make it something playable on some pressed and printed trees that sit on your table? You take the one of the core facets of the experience and hone it down into the one of the purest parts of the game. The hunt itself. One the things I enjoyed about the original game was the combat and how much it required planning ahead of the execution. With the number of resources and possible lines of attack you could take, often what you did before you notched that first arrow would often decide on how the

There is a difference, so give me a chance to explain. I can play a mechanically simple game, and as long it's solid but compelling then you can file such a title under the term of gateway game. It's a starter to an evening, or a quick half hour before you do something different. When it comes to games for younger children, there's the temptation to make them simple, horrifically colourful, easy to understand but not necessarily something that you'll be wanting to come back to again and again. Sometimes we wrongly assume that complicated means losing someone's attention, especially if it's coming from younger eyes. So we keep the mechanics dialed down, sometimes too much, and they end on the shelf, right next to the copy of Kids Cluedo and the Spiderman jigsaw puzzles.  Andor - The Family Fantasy Game gives some strong indicators that it might be lacking in confidence to push anything above a simple exploration game involving some fetch quests and a potential en

The ripples of the pandemic were felt far and wide across the board game event community, from clubs having to go on hiatus, to retail stores putting game nights back on the shelf and trying to continue selling online instead. It was probably felt the most in the cons, where all of a sudden thousands of expectant players found they had no where to gather as signs of cancellations went out and those who had dates in their diaries marked as something to look forward to, had to make more mundane plans.  Time is a healer as some would say, and while COVID has been more downgraded than eliminated from society, society needed to get back together. We need that human interaction and exhibitions like Tabletop Scotland are a chance for lots of us to get under one roof with a shared passion with like minded people and push pieces of cardboard around on bigger bits of cardboard.  Due to the podcast and the number of people I have spoken to over the years, cons for me are like meeting people at th

In the videogame world there are games that are seen as system sellers. Games which have such a huge fanbase that the mere fact of them appearing on that gaming platform creates one of the reasons for owning that system. Fans will play that game religiously and very rarely touch another game in the lifetime of that gaming machine. One of the biggest system sellers is the FIFA series of games. With yearly iterations and small changes made to how the game plays, it sells copies in the millions due to the huge football fanbase in the UK and Europe. It has always come as a surprise to me that football (or soccer if your an American who thinks a foot based sport comes with padding and helmets and ridiculous scoring), has never really appeared much as a genre with the tabletop space. I'm aware of the Blood, Guild and Dreadballs of this world, but they seem to be all riffing from the US running and tackling model. You would think that the hectic game of ninety minutes would be an easy sho

Recollect And so we scratch our heads once again, in vain. As we try to recall or remember what that item was. Neurons fire and flicker and our eyes dart back and forth  as though we are watching a tennis match.  Over those shapes of card that look like brains. Those five challenges that mock our gaze. As we scratch our heads once again in vain,  while the objects that we thought we had grasped  in our minds eye escape us once again. I gasp  in frustration. Was it a bath? A watch? An Aubergine?  Some pills maybe? A car? A Key? I can't recall.  And all the while the hiss goes on as torturous time  forces us to make speedy guess which in turn morph  into speedy messes. It was cake. I'm sure it was cake. The sand falls as it does like a small impending storm. As we scratch our heads once again in vain while the vein in our heads throb and pulse, that vein.  Was it rain? And the brain like card is turned over and  we laugh and moo because it turns out it was a coo.  There is a sigh

There are games that require maximum concentration, so much to the point that the friendly chit chat falls away into the silent contemplation of a state of almost analysis paralysis as it is known. Other games demand less attention and less brain power, but will still have those moments where serenity is called for so that someone can sit back and truly decide on their next move. Those are the games were you sit and have a cup of coffee and share stories and catch up, hoping to will your opponent into casual abandonment that hopefully wins you the game.  Kahuna from the mind of Gunter Cornett balances on that fine line like a tightrope walker, where you can safely state that this isn't going to require huge amounts of rule checking in order to play. It runs as an area control game where you play as one of two sorcerers from the Pacific who have decided compare the size of their egos by trying to control as many of the twelve islands the see in front of them. Decisions on influence

Fir aw the times yi hope yi end up gieing the chance tae look at summin braw and special and summit that the high heid yins are aw spraffing aboot, thurs aways the chaunce yi sit there thinkin, am a gieing it laldy here coz I am gettin tae ploy it? Sometimes yir better waitin until aw cont hiz calmed doon, and yi dinnae feel like some wydo is sitting aun yir shouldoor, checkin yir watch fir ya, and tutting like a radge.  Tiny Toon fae Alderac wiz such a game. In the past yi couldnae move fir sumwan chattin aboot it, stickin it oan lists and Twitching all oer tha innernet. Like, it wiz so gid tha it even wun tha top prize at Origins. Tha probbly ment tha heid bummer, Mr McPherson wiz toap man fir five minits in his hoose, so he goat the remote fir the telly, and was given the extra crunchy bit off the fish supper oan friday.  Tiny Toons is aboot wid an bricks an glass and stoan, and yir aw like the heid man makin the calls, tellin fowk wit tae build wi an they aw need tae follow yir lea

In terms of the videogame, I jumped into the Resident Evil Series from number three onwards. Even though it was some time ago now, I remember tension of playing, moving from room to room while trying to manage your ammo, and even control where you wanted your character to walk to. For some reason at the time even the control scheme did its best to make things as tricky as possible to navigate around something as easy as a corner. Only now looking back do I realise how much of a genius move that was, as the Nemesis came lumbering towards you and all you could do was scream, rotate wildly and run into a doorway. It did that thing that so many horror films want to achieve, which is a slow painful death that is creeping towards you slowly, and you are merely delaying the inevitable.  With that in mind, while I always approach these adaptations with a hint of trepidation as past history has shown that board games don't always translate well onto cardboard. Especially when you are trying

So after the rules laden buffet of the previous games I've written about recently that were digested with gusto and on one occasion resulted in a silent but deadly passing of wind. We take a trip into one of those games in which you're given the framework and boundaries in which you play, and it's up to you to craft your own experience. You can look on Greenville 1989 as a game that falls into the same kind of genre as Mysterium or Dixit which is about interpretation of imagery, but with artwork that would sit nicely on the cover of a 80's Horror VHS cassette box. This is unsettling horror with things that are strange without the obvious IP borrowing.  Greenville is a base salad, with leaves intending to inspire you as you play to relay the wildest tales of where you find yourself and try to explain why you're in a forest or a classroom or swimming pool, instead of meeting at the intended bowling night. In each of the rounds you'll try to explain where you are a

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