We're Not Wizards - Tabletop Board Game Reviews

You all remember Wordle. Do you remember Wordle? For a time it was the morning cup of coffee staple before everyone jacked themselves into the online work environment at nine a.m. People loved and still love it so much, that a major national newspaper paid the designer of the game a hefty sum to have it appear on their website. Now of course it's maybe not as popular in public but I'm sure it still very much has its fans guessing away and cursing when badly spelled US word came up. (ITS NOT COLOR) Before Wordle, the last big thing I remember was Sudoku, a game that had been quietly bubbling away from the 19th century to it's renaming in Japan and subsequent feature in a British newspaper in 2004. The public loved its simplicity and complexity, how it could be both very accessible and almost code breaking cryptic should the need arise. Sudoku is still very much a thing, and such is the essence if its purity that trying to create something based on those extremely strong foun

Sometimes in the world of board game reviewing you get Déjà vu, where you get the distinct feeling that you've gone through similar mechanics or similar moves very recently as you start to learn and play a new game. Sometimes it comes at the detriment of the newer game as you can end up subconsciously comparing if the new game does certain things better or worse. Other times it makes learning the newer game a much simpler prospect, as the base mechanics are already there even if the components and art bears no similarity. You know neither game influenced the other and the shared mechanics are pure coincidence but it's interesting to see how theme can play such an important role in helping to shape your end opinion of a game. I had this recently after playing Keystone North America over the last couple of weeks having recently reviewed Village Rails. Two completely different looking games that shared some common mechanical similarities.  Keystone North America comes from the min

Some games need the players to sing, whether your are in the realms of social deduction of the likes of Werewolf or Coup or even on a family throw down of Uno. The game has the base mechanics to make it work, but what is going to make it shine is the level of interaction between the players and how they add that little grain of sand that will eventually become a pearl. It's such a difficult thing to achieve perfectly that some of the most complicated games I have played actively discouraged direct communication or interaction in favour of heads down and numbers up. In my opinion, it takes a bit of courage to put a game out there that relies on it.  Which takes us to Langskip from Crab Studios, in which as a Viking that fell in battle, you've ended up in Helheim by mistake and need to use a mixture of bluffing and card play in order to make the climb to Valhalla. The rules are fairly simple, you have two cards dealt to you plus an all important reference card. On your turn, you&

There's a reasonable number of things going on in Wormholes from AEG. When I saw the game was designed by Peter McPherson of Tiny Towns fame, I kind of mistakenly thought that it might just be a spiritual successor, a kind of spatial spatial puzzle set in space. You get the idea. These things kind of concern me most of the time, as they can often end up looking like just a reskinned mechanical expansion. But Peter is a smart man and I was wrong to assume that he would take such a simple route. This to me could be seen as his second attempt to keep me impressed and continue to make my eyes light up when I know I'm getting the chance to play one of his wares.  Wormholes is like one of those vast videogame RPGs, without actually being an huge videogame RPG. It goes from being the beginning of a videogame RPG where you are trekking everywhere on foot, to being one of those RPGs where you have have vast control of the map and can zip about places to your hearts content, jumping from

I imagine that in the big game production line, when they are putting together the different types of games on the conveyor belt, there are a range of jars that hang overhead, each with a different flavour ready to be dispensed and sprinkled onto the box below. Some of the games are sprinkled with cuteness, others with horror. Some are covered in the Sci-Fi and space dust. On others the dust is crunchy and some it's simply a sweetener to make things go down easily. Sometimes the jar misfires and the dust floats down but doesn't quite take and other times there's an abundance with drowns the poor game in just a little bit too much flavour. With Achroma from Realm Runner Studios, you get the feeling that they made sure that their series of games were stopped right under the Charm jar, because as soon as you start to open the box and gaze on the first couple of cards, you can't help but smile. There's a huge amount of Studio Ghibli that resonates from the cards as you

There's an occasional knock on the door from the outside that reminds us that the realm of modern tabletop is a fairly smallish type of place. Not every game that is out there has come from the marketing zone that is crowdfunding, not every game is designed by someone who we follow on social media and more importantly, not every game is going to have a twenty three page rulebook, a Rodney Watch It Played or a Slickerdrips live play through. We've become occasionally snobbish in our old age and can be easily accused of turning up our nose at something just because it doesn't make our eyes squint when we are trying to learn it.  Take A Race in Time from History Heroes. There's a good chance that this review might end up being longer than the rulebook itself. It would be easy for me to line this up at the end of the street before I take a run up and kick its ass with a running jump, cackling with glee about the simple movement track and race to the finish. When you take a

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