We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

After a while you get to recognise a Turczi, whether it's the aroma when you first unwrap the packaging, the subtle hint of sarcasm in the box, or the rulebook that usually has the exceptionally small font, or the fact that the game itself is trying to push the genre just that little bit further. Here's someone who isn't willing to accept what others have done and just do their version of it. There seems to be an obsession from the man to push the envelope and get you thinking at the same time. I'm guessing if you look in his cupboards, the peanut butter is never smooth. That he cooks his veggies for 4 minutes instead of five, and you'll never catch him dunking his biscuits in his tea. Vengeance Roll & Fight is a roll a write that just like Rome & Roll (still the most stupid name in history of naming games) requires the use of dry wipe boards and gaining resources in order to carry out your actions to score points. Vengeance is closer to a dungeon crawler th

So if I explain to you how the night went, then maybe it will give you some understanding as to why the initial impressions of Village Rails were maybe skewed in a certain direction. The game night started with a groups  introduction to Akropolis, which went down sweeter than a syrup covered jellyfish. Followed by the surprisingly simple but analysis paralysis inducing The King is Dead. In the case of both of these, at least one of us already knew how to play the game and were able to guide everyone else. When it came to Village Rails, we were approaching the end of the night, it was a new game to learn and even though we were in the 'game zone' we found our first experience to be a slightly bitty and a tiny bit overwhelming.  To be clear I'm not trying to be critical here, Village Rails is a deceitful little bugger. It arrives in a cute little box with a deck of cards, some cardboard markers and a twelve page teeny tiny rulebook. The rulebook is filled with diagrams and ex

There's a skill to making a game as easy to play as possible. It is a road paved with traps and misdirection and distractions, where going down the wrong road can often lead to frustration, and in the worst case, a game not finding a way back to the table very soon. While I genuinely use my own opinions as the base for many reviews that I've produced in the last six years, when the people you are playing with are genuinely happy to have another round of a game with hesitation, you know that the designer must have succeeded in making huge inroads in making their effort accessibly playable.  Akropolis from Giga Mic wants you to get laying tiles as quickly as possible. There are no punchboards to fiddle with, the quarry tokens are already bagged up. The tiles have printed on the back the number of players they should be used for. The rulebook is simple and straightforward to read through and understand. In your turn you pick from one of line of tiles, with the price increasing as

  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