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When I Dream Review

In my experiences over the past three to four years in this hobby, whether it’s introducing games to new groups, playing lots of new ones myself or consuming so much board game media content that I see more of Tom Vasel than my girlfriend, there’s one thing that I’ve noticed: Social deduction games are very polarizing. This genre is the very definition of divisive, one that you either love or hate. Apparently, some people just aren’t into lying to their friends’ faces or getting into heated arguments where most people’s main point is, “Listen, just believe me, not them!”

Imagine that!

As for myself, I love social deduction if it’s done right. One of the most memorable and stressful (in a good way) experiences I’ve ever had in the hobby was from a game of The Resistance. Spyfall and A Fake Artist Goes To New York not only offer a fun avenue to pick your friends’ brains and discover just how clever everyone around the table is, but have also resulted in some of the funniest moments I’ve had in gaming. As much as I love these games, however, I pivot back to the beginning where I said some people are just going to outright hate these games. That game of The Resistance I mentioned? That very same game resulted in one of the players announcing he’ll never play it again because of how everyone was at each other’s throats and how he felt cornered when the game was at the height of its intensity. And Spyfall? As funny and light hearted as I find the game, I have one friend who gets such anxiety when she’s the spy, she literally blurts out “YES, I’M THE SPY” at the slightest hint of suspicion towards her (she has since refused to ever play the game again too).

I completely understand the hang ups with the genre and am at peace with the fact that I just won’t get to play these types of games that often. That’s why it does my heart good to know that there is a social deduction game that works for people who don’t like social deduction. And that game is When I Dream.

To call When I Dream a social deduction game may be a tad misleading. The game, as I’ll explain, is actually as much a word association game as it is a social deduction game. But social deduction is certainly still there, with the tropes of hidden roles and traitors alive and well in its design. So what is When I Dream? Besides the answer to the question, “When is the only time where I’m truly happy?” of course.

When I Dream is a delicious fusion of word association and social deduction. The game is comprised of double sided cards with dream like, Dixit style surreal art, each with a word on top and on the bottom. The cards are placed into a plastic bed with one of the words covered, showing which words on the cards need to be guessed as they’re cycled through.

When I Dream bed — Easily the best bed component in board games since the timeless classic *Don’t Wake Daddy*.

One player dons a sleeping mask and is known as The Dreamer and they are going to receive clues from the other players to help them guess the words on the card as they come up. The Dreamer gets one guess per card and if they’re right it goes to the correct side and on the incorrect side if it’s wrong. The Dreamer gets points for every card on the correct side. Simple, right? Weelllllllll….

Here’s the twist that makes When I Dream so brilliant and takes it from a super straightforward word association game and turns it into a fiendishly clever social deduction game. Not everyone around the table wants The Dreamer to get the words correct. In fact, some want The Dreamer to get the words flat out wrong. At the beginning of every round, the non-Dreamer players are given a hidden role. They’ll either be a Fairy, a Boogeyman or a Sandman. The fairies are allied with the Dreamer; they also get a point for every card on the correct side of the bed. The Boogeymen are the exact opposite; they get a card for every card on the incorrect side of the bed. Finally, the Sandmen are a mix of both roles and a bit of a neutral party. If the cards in the correct pile are equal to the number of cards in the incorrect pile, the Sandmen get a nifty score bonus to elevate them above the others.

These hidden roles mean the Dreamer is unable to trust anyone at the table. The Dreamer needs to pay close attention to the clues being given to see who is giving clues that seem fairly well linked together and who is giving clues that seem juuuuust a bit off from the others. This is complicated by the fact that, of course, you have no idea what words you’ve correctly guessed throughout the round. Which means if you put your stock in the clues being given by the Boogeyman early on in the round, you’re going to be paying attention to the wrong clues. And in this game, all it takes is one clue for you to guess the incorrect word. If you have the clues “big” and “cat” and “stripes”, you’re going to give a much different answer than if the clues are “big” and “cat” and “mane”. If the person who gives the deciding clue is on your side, awesome! You’ll probably get points. But if the person who gives that deciding clue isn’t…well, get ready for a smug looking face when you lift that face mask off your eyes.

Herein lies the game for the clue givers, as well. As the Fairy, your job is straightforward. Just try and link the word with obvious clues. The Boogeyman has a bit of a tougher job. They want to give clues that are close enough to the word but not close enough for the Dreamer to actually guess the word. Going back to my earlier example, if the word is ‘tiger’, than going “mane” or “spots” or “Africa” are great clues to give. They’re all related to big cats, but not to a tiger, which leaves the Dreamer in a vulnerable position. Not only is there a chance the Dreamer will blurt out “Lion!” or “Cheetah!”, but they have no reason to not trust you on future clues. BUT. If the word is ‘tiger’ and you give the clue ‘elevator’, the Dreamer is gonna start side eyeing you beneath their mask. As the Boogeyman, you can’t let the Dreamer know who you are or they’ll stop listening to your clues for the rest of the round and you might as well go grab a drink. But manage to hide in plain sight, giving clues that don’t give away your true intentions AND get words on the incorrect side, and you’ll be reaping in the points at round’s end.

This tight wire balancing act is the reason why playing the Boogeyman is the most fun role in the game for me. It requires you to be clever and quick thinking and the chaos you can sow with your misdirection is hilarious. Not to keep going back to the tiger clue, but imagine a scenario where someone says “Cat” then “Mane” and you follow it up with “Stripes.” Suddenly, the Dreamer is stuck in a scenario equal to that cliché movie scene where a character is standing with a gun in front of their friend and their evil twin and they need to decide who to shoot, as both of them say, “Listen to me! I’M the real one!” I’ve been in situations where the word was ‘hot air balloon’ and the clues were ‘transportation’, ‘flying’, ‘ocean’, ‘ship’, ‘sky’ and ‘voyage’ and you could literally see the Dreamer’s brain break into two. It’s moments like this that make When I Dream such a beautifully fun game.

There’s a couple of other cool things worth mentioning. After time runs out for the Dreamer, they can then reel off all the words that they’ve guessed, and they’ll get bonus points if they recall all the correct guesses. You can simply list the words in a monotone voice, like you’re brainwashing a Manchurian Candidate with activation words OR you can weave the words into an actual dream like story. Where else can you tell a tale along the lines of “I was dreaming and Keith Richards swooped down on a DRAGON and he had a MASON with him and they were both yelling at a TIGER because it forgot to buy a CLOCK for their CABIN.”? Not only that, but we’ve noticed the Dreamer is consistently able to better remember the words when telling it in story form rather than just listing them, so When I Dream provides a nice bit of psychological study along with your board game. How would THAT be for your next Kickstarter stretch goal?

The last thing I’ll rave about is the production value. I had one person turn their nose up at it and call it overproduced, but I rarely find ‘overproduction’ a bad thing. In this case, it makes a memorable party game that much better. I already mentioned and provided a picture of the bed that the deck of cards sit in, but there is also the board that the bed sets down into. It uses crisp and clear iconography to remind you of how each person scores and where the various cards go when guessed. Plus, the board’s art is colorful and lush, a vibrant type of art style that I absolutely adore in games. Speaking of the art, the art on the actual cards needs no introduction. So many games have “Dixit-style art” on its cards that it is basically its own genre at this point. And I’m totally fine with that.

When I Dream cards — Hunter S. Thompson calls, he wants his manic hallucinations back.

The surreal, dreamy art that adorns the cards will have everybody rubbernecking around the table so that they can gawk at it. I do find it a little ironic that the art is this amazing and one player around the table is literally blindfolded so they can’t even see it, but that’s okay, everybody else is able to enjoy it.

It’s tough to find things to complain about with When I Dream. Every group I’ve introduced this to has not only loved it, but immediately demanded to play a second game right after the first. At about $40, you can definitely argue that it’s a little expensive as far as party games go, a genre of games which usually range from like $15 to $25. In this case, you can maybe grumble about the overproduction because that is a bit of a price tag. There’s also the fact that the Dreamer puts on a sleeping mask which some people are not okay with, especially if they’re playing with strangers and/or in a public space. They can close their eyes, sure, but even that may make people feel uneasy and I don’t have a solution for that. Maybe just have them turn around from the board? Just something to keep in mind when introducing the game.

I started off the review by mentioning how this game is a great social deduction game for people who hate social deduction, so I’ll end it by standing by that comment. It takes what makes social deduction great (clever use of wits, using detective work to figure out who your friends are) and removes all the mean, stressful bits (lying, arguing, fearing for your safety as tensions rise). But it’s not just that. It’s also an amazing word association game and an awesome game for parties. At a player count of 4-10, it’s also incredibly versatile. I even skeptically tried it at 4 and was delighted to find this is a rare social deduction game that still manages to work very well at its lowest player count. If any of those things sound appealing to you, When I Dream is an absolute must have. It’s the best party game since Codenames (one of my all time favorites) and will hopefully be remembered right along side of it as one of the hobby’s recent classics.

That’s Not Lemonade! Review

Loyal readers of my blog (hi Mom!) will probably know that I am a big fan of push your luck. In fact, I think I’m pretty comfortable saying it is my favorite mechanism in board games. No other game mechanism has created as many memorable moments as push your luck. Whether it’s the entire group cheering and standing up around the table when someone beats the odds or someone groaning and putting their heads in their hands when they realize they’ve gone too far, push your luck exemplifies the best of what board games can be as a shared, social experience. I fell in love with the genre when I first played Incan Gold, a game where you and your opponents try to snag the most treasure from a temple before they succumb to the dangers hidden within the game’s deck. Ever since then, I’ve kept an eye out for any popular or new games that heavily feature the mechanism, my ears perking up like a hunting dog when I hear of one. Which is why when I heard of That’s Not Lemonade! on Kickstarter, I knew I just had to back it.

That’s Not Lemonade! was on Kickstarter earlier in 2018 and I knew it was my type of game right away. Simple, elegant, pure push your luck, and it was a Kickstarter game that didn’t cost $150! This is probably because the game doesn’t include 50 sculpted minis and eight pounds worth of metal coins, but it’s still refreshing to see. I backed it almost instantly and I got my copy towards the end of last year. After playing it quite a few times over the past couple weeks, I’m happy to report that it is a heck of a lot of fun.

(Side note: From here on out, I am referring to the game as TNL because the exclamation point in That’s Not Lemonade! is causing Word to autocorrect and capitalize the next letter in the sentence and, hoo boy, it‘s annoying.)

As mentioned before, TNL is a push your luck game in the same vein of Incan Gold, which was powered by a “stay or go” mechanism. However, while Incan Gold was about plundering a temple of untold riches, this game is about trying to not drink pee.

The genre has come such a long way.

In TNL, players are enterprising individuals trying to run an honest business of selling lemonade. Problem is there’s only one street corner, so what are we to do? Battle to the death? Nah, this isn’t an area control game. Build our lemonade empire from the ground up, hoping to create an economic engine that outpaces the rest of the players? What is this, a Vital Lacerda game? Nope, we’re going to drink our faces off and see who can drink the most. I’m talking about lemonade, of course. Well, unless it’s pee. Because I forgot to mention, there’s a rascal going around the neighborhood just peeing in EVERYTHING and now some of us might end up accidentally taking a big swig of it. Hey, as long as it doesn’t have aspartame, right?

Already this game has more backstory and theme than most Reiner Knizia games, so that’s nice. But how does it play? Very simply. There is a deck of cards that goes around the table and everybody has a decision on their turn: Draw from the deck or pass it to the next player?. If you pass, you simply forgo drawing a card and give the deck to the next person, leaving the decision up to them.

Draw from the deck and you’re hoping for either lemon cards, which determine who wins the round, or ice cards, which help break ties. If you get one of these cards, you place it face down in front of you, without showing the others, and pass the deck on.

What you DON’T want is the “That’s Not Lemonade!” card, which very subtly dances around the subject of pee by having a sickly green lemon pictured on it. If you draw one of these, you reveal it and you have busted out of the round.

TNL Lemon — This lemon definitely looks like it drank either urine or a La Croix.

At the end of the round, everyone who hasn’t busted reveals the cards they have in front of them. Whoever has the most lemons wins the round and gains a point, taking one of their lemon cards and keeping it in front of them. This not only helps keeps track of everyone’s score, but alters the game going forward. Now the risk of busting has gotten slightly higher, making every pull of the card a dramatic, tense endeavor. By round 5 or 6? There’s so few lemons and so much pee in the deck that you’d think you were watching a video handed over by the Russians starring Donald Trump.

TNL Trump — Hey, that explains why he’s in the game!

This all culminates in a devious little game that can be explained in two minutes and played over and over again for two hours, packing laughs, cheers and groans throughout. The design decision to keep lemon and ice cards facedown confused me at first. “How can we know the odds if we don’t know how many of the cards our opponents have are lemons or ice?” I thought stupidly, because I’m stupid. I thought of Blackjack, THE quintessential push your luck game, and in that game you can clearly see who has what and calculate the odds from there. In this game you simply see how many cards someone has face down in front of them and I wasn’t sure how satisfying that would be. This is, of course, why I don’t have any designed games published, because not revealing your hand helps making the simple decision of draw or pass devilishly tough.

You see someone with a whole pile of cards in front of them, but what if they’re mostly ice? There have been moments where I pushed too far because I felt threatened by the amount of cards my opponents have only to find out had I just passed, I would have won with the hand I had. Conversely, I’ve sat on a measly two lemons, hoping everyone else would bust or have a handful of ice and discovered I lost very badly. This element of mystery not only helps ratchet up the suspense but even adds a dash of bluffing to the proceedings. Stuck with three ice cubes? Start passing every turn and see the panic in the other players’ eyes, forcing them to take risks and hopefully bust. I’m not claiming there are Skull levels of deception in this game, but there is more strategy than meets the eye.

The only real criticism I can level at this game is less a criticism and more a concern. As you can tell this game is light. Like, Christian Bale in The Machinist light. Obviously, that’s not a flaw but it does create the concern of staying power. I don’t know how many plays this game will have before it starts to feel stale or same-y. I have plenty of light games that still get played on a regular basis, like the aforementioned Skull or Cockroach Poker or Stew (hey, I reviewed that game!). Will TNL hold up over the next year and enter the pantheon of those filler classics? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep on enjoying TNL. I always love to have a quick filler in the rotation, especially for nights that involve ‘adult’ beverages. And no, not talking about pee this time.

Archaeology: The New Expedition Review

Oh dear, I’m sorry. I’ve come into your room and I’ve brought sand everywhere. Sorry, sorry, this happens ALL the time after I get back from treasure hunting in Egypt. The good news is, I’ve sold all the treasure I found for a lot of gold and I can afford to buy you a Roomba! The bad news is, this is just a metaphor for me to introduce my review of Archaeology: The New Expedition and I actually don’t have any money to buy you a Roomba. The sand is still real, though, all too real.

Ignore the sand, let’s talk Archaeology: The New Expedition. Archaeology is a filler card game that just got reprinted by Z-Man Games, after a long absence off the market. Funnily enough, the original game was a reprint as well, as the game used to be simply called Archaeology: The Card Game. The New Expedition included new art and a couple of gameplay tweaks not seen in the original. This reprint is just a straight reprint of that one which can be confusing but I suppose The NEW New Expedition just doesn’t have a good ring to it.

The game is designed by Phil Walker-Harding who has been gaining a lot of popularity with recent hits like Barenpark, Gizmos, and Gingerbread House. My main experiences with him have been with the adorable drafting game Sushi Go and the tile laying game Cacao (a game that has flown under a lot of people’s radars despite being very, very good). So I was quite interested in trying Archaeology since I enjoy PWH’s work and because I’ve heard a lot of good things about it as a filler card game, a genre of game that I’ve really started to love lately. Does it live up to its praise? Let’s find out.

At its core, Archaeology is a set collection card game that incorporates some trading and push your luck. You and your opponents are digging at a dig site (what else would you do?), trying to find treasure and wrangle up enough of the same types so that you can sell them for maximum profit. Gameplay is simple: draw a card and then either trade cards from your hand with a central market and/or sell sets of like cards for points at the end of the game. This elegance is one of my favorite things about the game. I mentioned in my last review (for the wonderful Vegas Dice Game , check it out) that I really love gateway games because I find them to be great tools for getting others into the hobby. Plus, I enjoy games where I don’t have to shave freshly grown five o’clock shadow after I complete it (looking at you, Eldritch Horror). In this sense, Archaeology sings. I can teach this game in less than five minutes and its ease of play creates an incredibly breezy experience which flies by.

To be fair, though, just because something is simple and easy doesn’t mean it’s good. Goodnight Moon is one of the easiest books on the planet to read, but I didn’t see that win any Pulitzer Prizes. So Archaeology is simple, but is it good? Short answer: yes. Long answer: yyyyeeeeeeessss.

The core gameplay loop is quite fun in the game. As you draw cards, you start to get a feeling for what types of treasure you want to go for, especially when you look out and see what’s in the market, where everyone at the table is doing their trading. Maybe you wanna go for the parchments, which don’t net a ton of points but are so common that you often accidentally procure a whole set of them without even trying. Then there are the rarer treasures that provide bigger payouts, but are obviously tougher to get. Trading with the market to get the goods you want is simple on paper, but tough in practice: you just trade equal value for equal value (so you could trade three cards with a one gold value for one card with a three gold value, for example) but you never want to give up something that your opponents can snatch up on their next turn. Deciding when to actually sell your artifacts is another tough decision. The game incorporates a scale similar to Bohnanza‘s ‘beanometer’ (I’m assuming that genius name is trademarked, so hopefully I don’t get sued by Uwe Rosenberg’s lawyers for mentioning it) where you can speedily sell small sets to get quick bursts of points or wait till you have a full set to get a whole bucket of them. This is made even tougher by the most diabolical mechanism in Archaeology: the sandstorms.

No, not the song “Sandstorm” by Darude. I’m talking about actual sandstorms. One is an unstoppable force of nature that wreaks havoc wherever it goes, and the other is a mechanism in this game. In the deck of cards that you’re drawing from every turn, there’s a set number of sandstorms. When drawn, they force everyone at the table to discard HALF your hand. Oh, you thought you could safely hoard all those Pharaoh heads, broken cups and talismans like the world’s messiest museum curator? Heh, cute. Nope, you have to get rid of half of them and they allll go into the market. Luckily, you choose what you lose but occasionally the sandstorms come at a really bad time and you may lose something you really need. And the moment you lose something valuable, everyone’s eyes light up as you begrudgingly put it in the market. Suddenly, this easy, light card game becomes a tense race against time, where you’ll be gripping your cards so tight you’ll practically squeeze the linen finish out of them. You’ll dread every draw from the deck, pleading for just one more turn to trade for that last card in the set you need.

The game does offer a counter to the sandstorms in the form of a tent card. Everyone starts the game with one tent card. If a sandstorm appears and you just aren’t in the mood to deal with that crap, you can flip over said tent card and gain immunity from its negative effects. BUT it’s a one time use, creating yet ANOTHER difficult choice. Do you use your tent early, trying to preserve a hand but knowing your chances of hitting another sandstorm are still relatively high? Or do you save it for later, but risk losing so many cards in the process that by the time the last sandstorm hits you have nothing left to protect? I’ve hit both situations and cursed Past Kyle for his decisions which is always the sign of a good game. I certainly don’t have enough opportunities for self loathing in my life.

The last thing to mention are the monuments. In the game is a monument set to the side which can be explored using map cards. Rather than selling those map cards in for a small amount of points at the end, you can spend sets of them to activate the monument and gain extra cards through that avenue. There are even six monuments in the game, each one behaving differently and creating a uniquely different flavor for each game. Enjoy the plain but classic taste of vanilla? Try the Pyramid, which has three stacks of cards, each one getting bigger than the last. Trade in bigger sets of maps, and you get the bigger stacks which gives you a TON of cards to work with. Prefer your monument with a bit of spice in it, like a habanero based hot sauce? May I suggest the Mines, which lets you play a mini game of Blackjack, drawing cards one at a time and hoping you don’t go over a certain gold value which would result in a bust. These monuments don’t just add another decision to keep in mind, but help freshen each game of Archaeology. This is particularly useful since, at a brisk 15-20 minutes, this is a game that you’ll like play two or three times per session. It’s a small addition (one that actually wasn’t in the original Archaeology: The Card Game) and a welcome one.

Now’s the part of the review when I tell what isn’t great about Archaeology. Luckily, there’s not much to dislike there, but there are a few things worth mentioning. For an otherwise peaceful game of trading artifacts and selling them for gold, this game can be mean. The sandstorms can really wreck your day if the timing is bad for you, even with the immunity granted from a tent. Having a great set of treasure sliced in half because of a sandstorm will have you creating new curse words to say. People out there might smugly slide their glasses up their noses and proclaim, “Well, sell your treasures before the sandstorm and get gud lol”. To that I say, easier said than done. It’s impossible to tell when a sandstorm will hit till the deck starts to hit its second half and the odds start to become clearer, and up till then it’s a crap shoot as to when to sell and when to hold on for juuust a bit longer. I’ve played with a player who detested having their hand constantly under attack by random pulls of the deck and they didn’t have a fun time with the game.

And did you think the sandstorms were mean? Then allow me to finally introduce the thief card to you. In addition to sandstorms, there are sneaky thieves lying in wait, which, when drawn, allow you to take a card from another player’s hand and add it to your own. This is doubly frustrating because not only do you lose the card, but your opponent gains it. When you see that player immediately sell it as part of a large set on their following turn? The curse words you make up here will make the curse words you made up during the sandstorm look like they belong in a Berenstain Bear’s book.

The last possible hang up people might have is how swingy the game can be in terms of luck. You can get useless cards all day while your opponents are drawing all the high priced treasure and maps and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can adjust and try to go for selling tons of cheap treasure but I’ve yet to see that pan out.

archaeologyhand — Alrighty, let’s see what Lady Luck has in store for me this turn oh cool it’s a 9th parchment scrap.

Ultimately, if you get annoyed with luck deciding a game, this might not be for you. I personally don’t mind it since it’s just a short 20 minute filler that can be quickly played again, but I’ve heard some people grumble about how lucky the game can be.

Ultimately, if you don’t mind luck heavy gameplay that will occasionally bully you, then Archaeology: The New Expedition is a great filler to add to your collection. It combines tense push your luck with trade based set collection in a tidy little package that will keep you entertained even several plays later.

Vegas Dice Game Review

Ahh, Las Vegas. The city of sin, a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. It’ the crown jewel of America’s southwest, where the dazzling neon lights fill the eyes and mind with wonder and anticipation and an animalistic hunger for thrills that can only be satiated by the dark soul beneath the city’s glitzy exterior.

What better backdrop for an abstract area control game!

Enter Vegas Dice Game. Originally published under the title Las Vegas, Vegas Dice Game is a dice rolling area control game for 2-5 players, designed by Rudiger Dorn. Mr. Dorn is probably best known for his game Istanbul, a game I have not had the pleasure of trying yet. My interest in trying Istanbul has definitely gone up since playing Vegas Dice Game, since, guess what, I really like this one.

In Vegas Dice Game, there are six casinos laid out on the table, each one representing a number of pips on a die, one through six. The casinos have a stack of money next to them, of varying total sum and denominations. On your turn, you take your eight dice, roll them, and decide what casino you want to place them at, making sure to match pips on your dice to the casino’s pips. The trick is, when you place at a casino you must place ALL dice rolled corresponding to that die number. So if you want to place dice on the ‘3’ casino, you must take every 3 you rolled and place it on there, whether it’s just one 3 or five 3s. This continues until everybody places all their dice out on the casinos and then the players take their payouts.

Payouts are luckily much simpler here than in the real Vegas, as you don’t need to have an armed escort when receiving the money. When determining who gets what, you look at who has the most dice at the casino and they receive the highest denomination of bill available. Whoever has the second most dice gets the second highest bill and so on. BUT it wouldn’t be a board game without some silly twist to keep things interesting and Mr. Dorn is happy to oblige us here. Because before you take a look at the casinos and determine majorities, you first look and see if there are any players who have equal amounts of dice at a casino and remove them. That means if you tie with anybody at a casino, those dice are about to be taken away by casino security, probably never to be seen again. It doesn’t matter if you have four whole dice placed on that casino and Karen has only one, if Jimmy comes along and places four dice of his own you both get eliminated and Karen smugly receives the top payout from that casino having spent just one measly die.

This tiny little rule transforms a fairly straightforward game of area majorities into a much thinkier affair with a bit of bite to it. Suddenly, you’re overthinking every placement of your dice, somehow believing that you’re wasting too many dice while not committing quite enough at the same time. You always want to be just one die ahead of the next person, desperate to avoid those devastating tie scenarios. But pay too much attention to one casino and suddenly everyone else is snapping up other ones uncontested. This balance is a delicate tight wire act, making you feel like an acrobat in a Cirque du Soleil show in the game’s titular city. Hey, maybe this game is thematic after all!

So the gameplay is great, but Vegas Dice Game holds a place in my heart for another reason; it is a very good gateway game. I do my best to be an evangelist for the hobby, so while I’m out there being a rulebook thumping preacher, I like to have a good selection of easy but fun and crunchy games to show to my victims I mean friends. Vegas Dice Game is one of those games. It’s super simple to teach, it’s got dice that act as a nice touchstone for non gamers and at a crisp 30-40 minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome for even the shortest of attention spans.

Let me put it this way: I taught this game to my parents, and they are the type that believe Clue is the cutting edge of board game complexity. They are generally the canaries in the coal mine for my gateway game testing and I’m happy to report that when we played this one, they did NOT choke on toxic gas. Not that that sort of thing happens often at my game nights.

While I don’t have many big complaints about this game, I do have a few caveats. My first is how the game scales. I wanna be clear that the game actually doesn’t scale that badly, but there is a definite jump in quality from the 2-3 player count to the 4-5 player count. Like most area control games, the more the better. If you do wanna play with 2 or 3, the game offers an optional variant that includes a neutral player that helps do some blocking and competing for casinos. Neutral players in area control games rarely work well, so before go clutching your crucifix and hissing at me, the problem with low player counts in this game actually ISN’T the neutral player. The problem with lower player counts is that with less competition for the casinos, it becomes clear that you should place as few dice out per turn as possible and try to milk your dice longer than the other players so that you can get the last few turns and swoop in on casinos without your opponents being able to respond. In higher player counts, this sort of thing is less of an issue because so many people are competiting across the different casinos that it’s tough to win more than two casinos. But I’ve seen plenty of 2 player games where one player has a clean sweep and the other player leaves with nothing because the other player simply didn’t have dice left over to defend this one person sniping everything for themselves.

The other issue that might cause people to bristle is there is a good amount of luck in the game. Though there is very much strategy to consider and enact, some of the rounds can be determined by who simply rolled better. That doesn’t bother me that much, but it may get under some people’s skin. But, I mean, the game does have ‘Vegas’ and ‘Dice’ in its title, so, uhh, dunno what you were expecting. Just be happy that if you get unlucky in this game, you won’t lose your loved ones because your crippling gambling addiction has reached an all new low and your life enters a downward spiral that is only numbed by alcohol and self loathing. At least, I haven’t seen that in any playthroughs yet. Maybe if there’s an expansion.

All in all, if you’re looking for a light, enjoyable game with dice chucking and a hefty dose of push your luck, then Vegas Dice Game fits the bill. It may not have the adventure and dangerous allure of an actual trip to Vegas, but at least there’s no Wayne Newton and you won’t come home with belly button piercings that you have no recollection of ever getting.

Stew Review

A couple of weeks ago, I did a review of Biblios, a game about trying to curate a monastery’s library in Medieval times. If you thought that theme was more soporific than a turkey breast injected with half a gallon of Nyquil, then get allow Stew liven things up. In Stew, you and up to 3 other players are pioneer farmers, trying to make the best winter stew.

Hmm, yanno, there may be a reason as to why board games haven’t gone quite mainstream yet.

Okay, maybe this bit of info will make it more exciting. In Stew, you and up to 3 other players are pioneer farmers, trying to make the best winter stew and ONLY ONE OF YOU CAN EAT IT. If this were a commercial, this would be the part where the explosions would happen, metal music would start blaring and you’d hear a Wilhelm scream somewhere in the chaos.

STILL not exciting enough? Damn, you must have ice water in them veins. Okay, if the theme doesn’t sell you, at least allow me to explain the game to you and tell you why this game, which is made up of just a mere 18 cards, is one of the most fun and addictive games I’ve played over the past couple months.

Before getting into the game, let me give you a little bit of info about this game because there’s a very good chance you haven’t heard of it, even if you are plugged into the hobby. Stew is a game published by an independent publisher called Button Shy Games. If you don’t know who they are, allow me to change that. They’re a game company that specializes in something called ‘wallet games’ which are exactly what they sound like. They’re games not just small enough to fit in a wallet, they’re literally IN a wallet. Button Shy handcrafts all their games in custom made wallets, meaning their games can quite literally fit in your pocket.

stew wallet — So small you can whip it out anywhere, especially in front of family and friends! Hmm, I dunno why Button Shy hasn’t adopted that as a tagline yet…

I have played a couple of other Button Shy Games and they have ranged from good (the meta heavy In Vino Morte, a party game where you’re poisoning your friends in a style that evokes that one scene from The Princess Bride) to very good (the two player tug of war Avignon: A Clash of Popes, a game where you and your opponent are pushing and pulling cards to get three of them on your side) to excellent (the cooperative city builder Sprawlopolis, a game that manages to pack a crunchy tile laying puzzle in just, again, 18 cards). After playing all these, I’m happy to report that Stew is my favorite of the bunch.

If Stew were an actual stew, the recipe would read like this: add one cup of push your luck, one ounce of deduction and a pinch of bluffing into a bowl and stir for 15 minutes. Serves 2-4 people.

If I had to compare it to a more well known game, the obvious choice would be Welcome to the Dungeon. In Welcome to the Dungeon, players are passing around a deck of cards that’s comprised of creatures. On their turn, they are either adding creatures to the dungeon or tossing them to the side and removing equipment that can help kill said creatures. This keeps going until one player is finally forced to enter the dungeon and take on the creatures everybody else put in there and hoping they don’t die but let’s face it, they probably are going to die and horribly.

The first time I played Welcome to the Dungeon, I reeeaally wanted to like it just fell short. One big issue was player elimination. Sure, it’s a fairly short game, but it’s just long enough that being eliminated early can be a huge problem (which happened to me). It also can be a little fiddly when you actually enter the dungeon and then have to cross examine every creature that pops up with the equipment you’re still holding while keeping track of your health in your head. This all led to an ultimately disappointing experience. Luckily, Stew takes the formula that I oh so wanted to love in Welcome to the Dungeon and makes an actual good game out of it!

Play is very simple. Every one is passing around a deck of ingredient cards and looking at the top card. These ingredient cards all have certain point values and represent the hallmarks of any great stew such as hearty potatoes, flavorful garlic and…a rock?

stew rock — Okay, who the hell invited Charlie Brown?

After looking at this top card, they then have a choice: put that ingredient face down in the stew or put it face down on a vermin card (more on the vermin later). Eventually, the stew will get bigger and bigger until some brave soul yells “STEW!”, which is the universal phrase anyone shouts when about to eat some stew. They take the cards in the stew and reveal them. If the sum of the points on the ingredient cards equals 12 or more, congratulations! You’ve eaten a damn fine stew and earn yourself two points. However, if the stew is 11 points or less then you have eaten a stew that can only be described as ‘not good’. With this, you receive no points, the rest of the players get one point and you are forced to write a negative review on Yelp. First to five points wins.

Calculating points is not as easy as just revealing what’s in the stew, however. Remember those vermin I vaguely mentioned earlier? Yeah, they’re a bunch of a-holes and they are gonna steal stuff from your stew if you didn’t feed them. If a vermin is unfed when the stew is taken off the stove, they steal specific ingredients as they pop up. For example, the rabbit steals the first carrot revealed from the stew, the fox steals the first chicken and the gopher steals the first leek (because everyone knows that gophers just effing LOVE leeks). This is bad because those are precious points leaving your stew and in this game, every point is precious. There is even a vagabond who just kinda chills outside and then pops in to see what’s in the stew. If there is a chicken in the stew, he mooches some of it off you and you lose 3 points. If there isn’t, you get a bonus 3 points as he passes it on by because he is apparently the pickiest drifter ever.

These vermin help provide much of the suspense in Stew, as you’re not quite sure what your opponents put in the stew and what they fed to the vermin. You CAN use the stone, which subtracts 3 points from your stew, against these vermin but most of the time you’ll get ingredients which makes every decision tense. Side note: using the stone on the vagabond paints of dark picture of these pioneers just straight up murdering this guy with a rock, making it feel like Stew takes place in a Coen Brothers film.

stew vagabond — No word yet on whether there will be an expansion where you hide him in a wood chipper.

Feeding these blasted vermin is important, but if you’re feeding them high scoring ingredients, then the stew won’t have enough points to put you over the 12 point threshold. Don’t feed enough of them though, and it won’t even matter what’s in the stew because it’s all just gonna be taken by these surprisingly stealthy and precise animals who know exactly what to take from your steaming bowl of stew. All this doesn’t even take into account that every player is side eyeing each other, twitching their fingers like gunslingers in a Wild West duel, wondering who will pull the trigger and yell ‘STEW!’ first.

And so begins the madness and double thought that you’ll be ensnared by for Stew‘s 15-20 minute run time.

This game will have you thinking and double thinking and triple thinking every decision that you and your friends make. The stream of consciousness that occupies your thoughts throughout this game would look like the ramblings of a psychopath if put on paper. ‘Ohh, Sally just put a card on the fox, which means she might know there’s a chicken in the stew and wants to keep it in there but wait maybe she fed the fox the chicken and she’s trying to lead us into believing there is going to be chicken but then again maybe she wants us to think that so that we don’t try to eat the stew and oh look Trevor just put something in the stew maybe it’s a potato those really rack up the points but the raccoon isn’t fed yet so that’s just gonna steal it anyway but maybe that’s what he wants and oh god it’s my turn I just turned over a garlic what do I doooooooo’. The transcripts of your brains thoughts at game’s end will read like a James Joyce novel, but much more enjoyable and less pretentious.

That sort of panicked battle of wits is one of the reasons why I love these types of games. It reminds me of Skull, one of my all time favorites, with every move being scrutinized and lots of bravado and confidence being deflated with each flip and reveal of the card. Cheers will erupt and groans will echo throughout the game, such as when you angrily shake the Stone card in everyone’s faces, demanding who put it in the stew. It’s an incredibly social game for that reason and helps showcase what makes board games so damn fun.

And you know what? Like with Biblios, I poked fun at the theme earlier in this article, but I honestly love the concept behind the game. It’s so unique and fun, with rustic looking art that really helps add to the pioneer era feel they’re going for. Throw on some bluegrass music in the background, and you’ll be wearing a straw hat and slugging down moonshine in no time.

I honestly don’t have much bad to say about Stew. As I already mentioned, the game will only take around 15-20 minutes, meaning it not only doesn’t outstay its welcome but is perfect for playing back to back (to back). Sure, the strategic depth of the game lives and dies by the meta, but that’s par for the course for these type of games. And really, that’s the only negative thing I can say: if you don’t like these types of games, games with bluffing and misdirection and doublethink, then Stew won’t do anything to change your mind.

I’ll simply end by saying that if this kind of game does appeal to you, do not hesitate to pick this up. You can find it on Button Shy’s site, along with the rest of their wallet game catalog. Tell them Kyle from Boar & Arrow sent you. Actually, they’ll have no clue what any of that means, but I’ve always wanted to say that.

Rising 5: Runes of Asteros Review

The two games I credit with getting me into the hobby are Forbidden Island and Pandemic. Both are largely considered gateway games in the hobby and they certainly were for me. Forbidden Island kindly showed me to the gateway, gesturing to the land of board games beyond, but it was Pandemic that brought me back to the gateway a few months later, carrying dozens of pounds of semtex to blow it wide open. It then cackled wildly, throwing me through the smoking, ragged threshold and I haven’t been seen by my family since.

The biggest similarity between these two games, besides the fact that they’re designed by the same guy and that they share some basic mechanics, is that they are both cooperative games. Because it was two cooperative games that brought me into the hobby, I have a certain fondness for them. Plus, the idea of working with your friends rather than viciously being at each others throats is also appealing to me (surprising, considering that I’m a socially anxious grump that likes alone time). As such, when a new cooperative game takes the hobby by storm, I tend to pay attention to it, aiming to try it as soon as possible.

Rising 5: Runes of Asteros (which I will simply call Rising 5 for the rest of the review, for the sake of my fingers and your eyes) is such a cooperative game. While ‘taking the hobby by storm’ is probably too strong a statement, this is certainly a game that has gotten a good deal of attention over the past year, thanks in large part to its app integration and unique concept of cooperative deduction. Is it worth the buzz? For the most part, yes, though Rising 5 is far from a perfect game (gasp!).

First, let’s hear what this game is about. The planet of Asteros is in peril, with some sort of eclipse that’s about to occur that will open a gate, thus allowing an apocalyptic wave of monsters to burst forth. The solar system calls upon a team dubbed Rising 5 to go to Asteros and figure out a way to seal the gate for good, saving Asteros from certain destruction. Believe it or not, this was the least nerdy way to summarize the game’s premise. The introduction in the rule book laying out the game’s lore reads like it was written by someone playing some sort of sci fi Mad Libs. Despite this, I enjoy when a game attempts world building (one of the many reasons why Scythe is, at the moment, my favorite board game) so I’ll stop making fun of it. In fact, the game actually does a great job of imbuing a sense of atmosphere and a tangible sense that Asteros is a real place. This is mostly because of the phenomenal art of Vincent Dutrait.

Over the past few months, Vincent Dutrait has gone from a board game artist who I thought was perfectly fine, to one of my favorites in the business and Rising 5 is a HUGE reason why. This game easily has some of the best art I’ve seen in a board game. The characters, whose portraits adorn the bottom of the board, ooze personality and the different regions of the planet are all distinct yet cohesive. The enemies that come out to attack your heroes are masterfully painted, causing a burst of revulsion in my gut every time I flip them over and see their strikingly detailed and ugly mugs. There is a picture on the back of the rule book that I purposefully left face up on the table as we played so that I could glance over at it and admire its beauty, like it was a shiny new car I bought and left out on the front lawn for the neighborhood to see and get annoyed with. I really can’t say enough good things about the art in this game, so I’ll stop with a simple bravo, Mr. Dutrait, bravo.

rising 5 rulebook — I will admit, though, my gaming group got kind of weirded out when I took this into the bathroom and didn’t come out for ten minutes.

Enough about the art. Your mother always told you to never judge a book by its cover, so we shouldn’t judge Rising 5 by its salivation inducing look and presentation. Granted, my mom also told me that gum would take like twenty years to digest in my stomach if I swallowed it, so maybe we shouldn’t listen to everything they say, but let’s humor them just this once. How does the game play?

Rising 5‘s elevator pitch is that it’s basically cooperative Mastermind. Mastermind is an old mass market game where one player set up a combination of colored pegs and the other person had to figure out said combo. They did so by placing different combinations of the pegs and the Mastermind would let them know which colors were correct but in the wrong place, which were correct and in the right place and which were flat out not in the code. It was decent fun, providing a nice logic puzzle for one player to chew on for ten to fifteen minutes, but that was the problem. It was just ONE player playing the game. The Mastermind/game master had one job at the beginning that took fifteen seconds, and then the rest of the game they were a glorified exam proctor. Rising 5 fixes this by making it cooperative, completely doing away with the game master. Instead of that annoying neighbor kid (you know, the one that invited you over to play Sega Genesis, said ‘Here let me try’ during the first level and then proceeded to beat the whole game), the game master is an app you can download for free on your phone.

You see, a major part of the game is taking the titular runes, represented by hexagonal tokens, and placing them in a specific order on the board. With the app, you are able to take pictures of these runes throughout the game and it spits back images correlating to mysterious astrological signs. Those astrological signs are secretly tied to one of the colored runes and it reveals similar information as in Mastermind: the rune is either 100% correct, correct but not placed correctly or not in the code at all. Not only do you and your team need to figure out which runes go with which signs, but also where the damn runes need to go. It’s a puzzling conundrum which requires deduction, logic and teeny bit of luck. It’s incredibly satisfying to crunch the combinations together as a group, trying to work out what runes need to stay and where they need to go. When you activate the app one last time and see that you indeed cracked the code, winning the game, it’s a triumphant moment of victory (at least until the app hilariously and abruptly cuts to a black screen, asking you to input some information so it can give you a grade for your performance).

Luckily, this logic puzzle is not the only thing that Rising 5 has to offer. There is an actual game built around the puzzle as well, involving some hand management and an action point system that you come to expect from a cooperative game.

This aspect of Rising 5‘s gameplay is very simple. Everyone has a hand of cards, with the cards representing one of the five main characters in the game. On your turn, you play a card/multiple cards of one character, taking as many actions with that character as cards played. So if you play two cards with the wizened sage Orakl, you get two basic actions with him. Those actions are equally as simple: you can move to a location, interact with a card at a location or attempt to solve the puzzle. Interacting with cards gives you free goodies or allows you to enter combat with a beastie, which is resolved by rolling a die and occasionally adding some buffs. Figuring out the most efficient way to use your cards is a fun dilemma, adding just enough meat to the bones of Rising 5‘s logic puzzle.

In addition, each character you use also has a special ability which you can trigger at the beginning of the turn. These abilities do even more to create a sense of personality for these characters. The aforementioned Orakl is the only character who can actually swap the runes and change their positions, making him a mysterious and mystical force that perfectly fits his character’s wrinkled, world weary look. If there was ever a Rising 5 movie (please don’t Hollywood execs reading this, it’s just a hypothetical), Orakl definitely looks and feels like the character whose death would definitely end the second act. There’s also the fierce Nova, whose ability to get a free combat perfectly captures her fighting spirit; the hulking robot HAL who can copy the ability of anyone at his location, thematically presenting him as a calculating machine programmed to learn and assimilate; Eli, whose magical ability to postpone Judgment Day by pushing back the tracker that triggers the game’s loss state hints at something deeper beneath her somewhat unassuming look; and finally Ekho, whose cocky yet charismatic expression perfectly matches his ability to lead the team and boss them around by sending them to different locations outside of their turn.

ekho — He definitely mansplained at least a couple things on the long flight to Asteros.

These thematic powers combined with the, again, stupendous art from Vincent Dutrait makes this team feel like an actual rag tag band of characters who truly need to work together to prevent a cataclysm from occurring. I couldn’t believe how attached I felt to them, considering the fact the game only runs around 30 minutes long and there’s not even any flavor text or anything on the cards. It’s maybe the most surprising thing about this game and something I definitely felt the need to mention.

Okay, so the art is good enough to be in a museum, the game’s central puzzle is rewarding to deduce, and the hand management is simple but fun. What do I NOT like about Rising 5? Well nothing is perfect (except Breaking Bad and pizza), and there are two big flaws with this game that prevent this game from being considered among the greats of the genre, like Pandemic or Ghost Stories. The first is the difficulty of the game, or lack thereof. This game is quite easy and that’s usually not a great thing for a co-op game. While I am not a cooperative game sadist, wanting every co-op game to kick my ass and make me call it mommy (did I just make this weird? I just made it weird, didn’t I), I do prefer my co-ops to be on the tougher side. That creates a sense of constant tension and, more importantly, hooks you back into trying it again so that you can finally beat it. That probably isn’t going to happen with Rising 5. You’ll likely beat it on your first or second try and there is rarely a feeling of having your back against the wall like other great co-op games produce. Again, this isn’t a huge deal breaker for me, but I know that it definitely is for a couple of my gaming friends. It is a little disappointing though, so keep it in mind.

The game’s second flaw is a bit more damaging for me, and that’s that the game feels quite same-y. Distilling the game into just three actions is great for introducing people and teaching it, but as you play the game it becomes quite clear that the mileage for those three actions is limited. Most of your turns devolve into either ‘move’ or ‘move and roll a die, hoping for good things’. It feels like if this game offered just one more plate to spin, maybe another sub objective for your team to contend with, it would not only have helped prevent some of this mundane repetition but also perhaps solve the difficulty problem too. If any game deserves and needs an expansion, it’s Rising 5.

With all that said, if you aren’t bothered by a somewhat easy experience that can feel a tad repetitive, you can do a whole lot worse than Rising 5. It’s a cool co-op experience that manages to feel different and unique from so many of the Pandemic clones that have flooded the market which, not to anger the cooperative God of Matt Leacock, is a good thing. If that sounds interesting to you, check Rising 5 out.

Top Ten Board Game Soundtracks

You know what’s nerdier than playing board games for hours on end, with no sunlight and only pizza and pretentious craft beer for sustenance? Doing that exact thing, but with thematic soundtracks in the background for each board game you play.

I dunno about you, but when I play board games, I like, nay, require, a soundtrack in the background. This soundtrack can’t be any old soundtrack, no. I’m not talking about playing Bruce Springsteen while I bust out a game of Sheriff of Nottingham. Both because that makes no thematic sense and also because I would never subject anyone’s ear drums to Bruce Springsteen unless they were like a war criminal or something (and even then, I’m pretty sure it’s against the Geneva Convention). When I choose a soundtrack, it’s lovingly chosen and well thought out, perfectly matching the theme and feel of whatever game we’re playing. In a previous review of Biblios (on this very site, check it out!), I briefly mentioned that I play Gregorian chant in the background. This is a perfect example of the type of soundtracks I choose. As I play Biblios, the soft hum of monks singing in the background transports me to the Middle Ages, where I can practically hear the sound of footsteps echoing down the monastery’s stone hallway. Suddenly, this game about collecting sets of cards becomes more than that. It becomes a trip to another era and an extremely atmospheric experience that I remember fondly time and time again.

If it sounds like I’m way too passionate about this, it’s because I am. I have gotten so bad with soundtracks and games that my enjoyment is somewhat hindered if I’m unable to play one in the background. One time I went out of town to a friend’s place, and he sheepishly told me upon my arrival that his wi fi was going to be out until the next day. This is bad because YouTube is my main source of soundtracks. Fast forward a couple hours later where we are about to play a game set in Ancient Egypt, and we’re furiously searching throughout his roommate’s extensive movie collection, yelling, “THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING EGYPTIAN THEMED TO PLAY IN THE BACKGROUND, DOESN’T HE OWN THE MUMMY??”

Soundtracks are serious business, people.

To show why, I’ve compiled a top ten list of my favorite soundtrack and board game combinations. As you’re about to see, these soundtracks range from movie and video game soundtracks, to a couple of random playlists on YouTube that just happen to have generic instrumental music that happens to work well with that board game. Picking only ten was agonizing, and I am absolutely sure I missed or even forgot of a couple combos that I really love, so this list is by no means 100% definitive. But what it does do is give you a good peek into my brain and thought process when picking soundtracks. I’m not sure anyone should get a peek into my brain and thought process at any point, but this should be safe and should definitely not reveal any of the deep seeded psychoses that plague me every day and every hour and the crushing anxiety and the oh dear I’m starting to ramble, onto the list!

10. Board Game: Fuse
Soundtrack: The Metal Gear Solid alert music

Fuse Soundtrack

Fuse is a cooperative dice drafting game where you and your teammates try to defuse a certain amount of bombs in real time. This makes it seem a lot calmer than it actually is, as Fuse is actually ten minutes of you and your teammates yelling, “AHHHHHH, I WANTED THE BLUE DIE, AHHHHHH”. It’s exhausting and intense, and as such needed a soundtrack that was equally as relentless and heart pumping. My choice for this one is the Metal Gear Solid alert music, which is the music that plays in the video game when Solid Snake gets caught by guards in between its forty minute long cutscenes.

It’s perfect because the pace of the music never slows down, much like the game, and also because it is super iconic. While I’m sure a lot of people won’t recognize this music, enough people should so that their pulses will instantly start pumping and they’ll be looking for the nearest cardboard box.

9. Board game: Literally anything Western themed
Soundtrack: Red Dead Redemption OST

Western Themed Board Game Soundtrack

Okay, this is a bit of a cop out. I’m not going to choose a specific board game for this one and am instead going to open an umbrella and just say that anything with a cowboy/western theme deserves the incredible Red Dead Redemption soundtrack as its background music. The ominous violin that starts the OST off, accompanied with the mournful whistling that’s eventually broken by a sharp, craggly guitar riff gives me gooesbumps every time I fire this one up. Whether I’m playing Dice Town, Bang! The Dice Game or Colt Express, this masterpiece of a soundtrack fits it like whiskey in a shot glass, pardner.

Since this entry was kinda cheap, I promise I won’t just pick a general theme and will only focus on specific games from here on out.

8. Board game: Literally anything archaeological themed
Soundtrack: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune OST

Archaeological Themed Board Game Soundtrack

Right, so, uh, I lied. Just one more time, I’m gonna go for a general theme rather than a specific game. Hey, don’t blame me, blame the fact that archaeology and treasure hunting is represented by more games than numbers that exist. For every one of those games, whether it’s the amazing two player card game Lost Cities or the wonderful deckbuilder The Quest for El Dorado or the imaginatively named Archaeology: The New Expedition, my go to soundtrack is that of the classic PlayStation series, Uncharted. In this example, I use Drake’s Fortune, but Uncharted 2 and 3 work just as well, so dealer’s choice.

7. Board Game: The Grimm Forest
Soundtrack: Trine 2 OST

The Grimm Forest Soundtrack

The Grimm Forest whisks you away to a land of fairy tales living together, where magic and wonder hides around every corner. So what are you doing in this game? Building houses, of course!

Despite the fact that the game has you doing housework like you’re some sort of fairy tale contractor, the art and characters in this game really do help engross you in a world where fairy tales are real, and I needed to find a soundtrack that also captures that magical feeling. Turns out, it wasn’t me who would find that soundtrack. This soundtrack was actually at the suggestion of a friend I was playing The Grimm Forest with, so credit is due to him. That soundtrack is the OST for Trine 2.

What the hell is Trine 2 you ask? Trine 2 is a somewhat obscure video game where you and up to two other players cooperatively navigate a fantasy world, solving puzzles and exploring mystical locales. It isn’t fairy tale themed, but the music the game provides has a whimsy and charm that pairs extremely well with the fairy tale world of The Grimm Forest.

I know some of you are probably asking, “Kyle, why not the Shrek soundtrack?” Well, I can’t find the actual score to Shrek on YouTube and instead it has the official film soundtrack which means you’ll be listening to “All Star” by Smashmouth as you play this game so unless you want that…actually that sounds awesome, feel free to replace any soundtrack on this list with “All Star”.

6. Board Game: Decrypto
Soundtrack: The Imitation Game OST

Decrypto Soundtrack

Decrypto is a cool spin on the word association party game craze that was started by Codenames. Codenames is one of my favorite games of all time and while Decrypto doesn’t quite live up to its lofty standards, it is still a fantastic game that deserves an equally excellent soundtrack. Enter The Imitation Game, the movie where Benedict Cumberbatch beats Hitler up in a fight using the Time Stone and his supernatural powers of deduction.

Wait a sec, please. (checks Wikipedia)

Okay, yeah, I mixed up a couple of Cumberbatches in my head, this is the one where he leads a bunch of codebreakers in World War II to try and crack the Nazi enigma machine. In all seriousness, this is one of my favorite movies and surprisingly fits this word association party game very well. As you and your teammates huddle around a notepad, stressing out over what your opponent’s code is, you’ll hear the haunting strings and tinkling keyboards of this fantastic score.

Fun fact time! I read a designer diary for this game, an apparently the box’s cover art was heavily inspired by The Imitation Game, as it looks quite a bit like the switchboard heavy machine Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing builds in the movie. Just wanted to add that here for a little vindication.

5. Board Game: Bohnanza
Soundtrack: Stardew Valley OST

Bohnanza Soundtrack

Before he was making two hour long worker placement games about EVERY type of farming, Uwe Rosenberg made a little card game that was about farming oh my god, is this guy serious?

Sigh. Okay, farming aside, Bohnanza is a masterpiece of game design. It’s a card game where you and your opponents are rival bean farmers and the only way to victory is to wheel and deal your way to the most efficient payouts possible, trading cards from your hand to manipulate the fact that you can’t change the order of your cards. I could go on and on about this game, so I’ll stop it there and just saw that the Stardew Valley soundtrack and this game are *chef’s kiss gesture*

The banjo that pops in and out of the music helps add to the farming theme, while the general mellow and optimistic tone of the whole package really jives with the lighthearted and cartoony art of Bohnanza‘s cards. Sure, a lot of this game is ruthlessly ripping off poor Grandma of her stink beans so that you can get rid of the one pesky card that is clogging your hand, but it’s still a pretty chill game otherwise, also fitting for Stardew Valley‘s soundtrack. Sorry, Grandma, but you kinda had it coming when you made those vaguely racist comments over dinner.

4. Board Game: Port Royal
Soundtrack: Sea Shanties

Port Royal Soundtrack

This is my first soundtrack selection that isn’t selected from a video game or movie, and is in fact just a YouTube playlist made by some good Samaritan. Port Royal is one of the most underrated games in the hobby, an Alexander Pfister design that mixes push your luck and tableau building in a Klemens Franz illustrated pirate theme. It’s a game I adore and will likely be writing one of my upcoming reviews for it (HOW’S THAT FOR A TEASE, EH?).

For this one, I loooove playing sea shanties in the background, courtesy of the YouTube video I linked. As I said, it’s just a random assortment collected by someone on YouTube, and there’s not much else to say about it. Just some pirates singing while working, and it really gels with the theme.

Now, as much as I love sea shanties, I understand that they’re an, uhh, acquired taste, so if this idea of listening to an off tune band of scallywags singing with no instruments to guide them, I would suggest either the Pirates of the Carribeans OST or the soundtrack for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

3. Board Game: Viticulture
Soundtrack: Sicilian Mandolin Music

Viticulture Soundtrack

And this is my second selection that is just a generic collection of music rather than an actual soundtrack from something. And oohh, is it a good one. I listened to the first minute or so of this soundtrack after I found it on YouTube for the sake of providing the link in this article and I felt a swell of happiness and nostalgia for games of Viticulture, games that immediately bubbled to the surface of my memory at the first twang of this video’s mandolin.

It helps that Viticulture is one of my top two favorite games of all time and even the game I consider my favorite depending on the day you ask me. What’s the other game? Guess you’ll have to stay tuned to my blog to find out. HOW’S THAT FOR ANOTHER TEASE, EH?

(It’s Scythe, by the way)

Viticulture is a worker placement game set in Italy where you own a vineyard and make wine, trying to be the best at owning a vineyard and making wine. This game is already one of the most immersive board gaming experiences I’ve played. Thanks to the thematic and methodical way in which you make the wine, and the warm, inviting art by the supremely talented Beth Sobel, I actually feel like I’m in the beautiful, sun soaked landscape of Italy. It’s as if I’m there, plucking grapes from vines, crushing them down into juice and preparing them for sale so that your Aunt Sally can get sloshed up at the family Christmas party. When you add to this formula the wonderful Sicilian and Mediterranean music found in the video above (and maybe even a glass of wine yourself), and you will have a gaming experience you will never forget. Well, maybe you will forget it if you have enough of that wine, you naughty lush you!

2. Board Game: Skull
Soundtrack: Guacamelee! OST

Skull Soundtrack

Back to official soundtracks, the silver medal goes to the oh so awesome combination of Skull and the soundtrack for Guacamelee!. Skull is a masterpiece, a brilliant bluffing game that will have you and your friends hooting and hollering and cheering and groaning like no other. Guacamelee! is a sidescroller beat ’em up, and is something in the video game world known as a Metroidvania. I won’t go into it here, but suffice to say that Guacamelee! is an incredibly fun game that is set in Mexican mythology and draws off the folklore of that region. The soundtrack takes mariachi and salsa music and combines it with electronica in a way that easily makes it one of my top three video game soundtracks of all time. Tying it back to Skull, Skull‘s heavily draws off of the sugar skull motifs that have come from Mexico, and was one of the reasons why I was drawn to Guacamelee! as its backing music.

From the first bombastic blare of the mariachi horns in this soundtrack, you’ll be tossing aside that wine from Viticulture and replacing it with some tequila as you buckle up for an incredible party game experience. Skull has no theme, so this soundtrack is purely for the aesthetics of the game but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a near perfect match.

1. Board Game: The Grizzled
Soundtrack: Valiant Hearts: The Great War OST

The Grizzled Soundtrack

I mentioned earlier that I when I play games without soundtracks or some sort of background music, that it actually can hamper the experience for me. That being said, I will never turn down a game because there is no soundtrack present and I obviously still have lots of fun playing board games, even if there is no ambient music available.
There is juuuust one exception. And that is my number one choice for board game and soundtrack combination: The Grizzled and Valiant Hearts.

The Grizzled is a cooperative game set in World War I and it is my favorite cooperative game that I’ve ever played. One of my favorite things about it is its art. The hand scrawled art style, created by the tragically late Tignous, looks like it was taken straight from a sketchbook, perhaps even one used by someone in the very trenches of the first World War. This art is fairly similar to the hand drawn art of Valiant Hearts, which is an indie video game also set in World War I.

Neither of these games are exactly what you’d call uplifting or lighthearted. After all, The Grizzled is game where you can go home as a selfish, demoralized mute with a life long, crippling fear of whistles and can still technically win. Not exactly a party game. They both deal in very heavy themes of war in one of history’s worst. This strong thematic link already makes the two a perfect pairing and it is even more apparent when you actually listen to the soundtrack as you play.

The somber piano that permeates Valiant Hearts‘ soundtrack tugs at your heartstrings as your play cards in The Grizzled. Melancholy strings buzz in the background as you and your teammates struggle to deal with the obstacles being thrown in your way. The music takes an already amazing cooperative game and helps it transcend the bits of cardboard that make it up. I probably sound like I’m exaggerating, and maybe I’m just weird, but this board game and soundtrack combo is such an important part of my gaming memories. And no, I’m not crying, YOU’RE CRYING. Okay, maybe I’m sobbing a little but it’s just so damn beautiful.

Do yourself a favor and play The Grizzled and then do it with this soundtrack. I hope it’s as moving for you as it is for me.

Biblios Review

Board games, like any great medium, provide a form of escapism. The best board games can create an immersive experience on par with a great book or movie. Take for example, a game such as Captain Sonar, which casts you and up to seven friends as crew members on competing submarines. It’s 45 minutes of heart pounding excitement as you and the rival team fire torpedoes, lay mines and do lots and lots of shouting.

Or how about The Resistance, the ostensible grandfather of social deduction. You and your friends find yourself in the shoes of a resistance group in a dystopian future. BUT there are spies among your ranks, trying to undercut you at every corner, and you need to weed them out. The good guys need to complete a certain amount of missions while the spies want to make sure most of those missions fail. It creates agonizingly suspenseful moments as your friends ruthlessly accuse one another, desperately try to exonerate themselves, and do lots and lots of shouting.

Or how about Biblios, the featured game of this review where you and up to three players are rival monks, trying to complete…the best library? Like, just a library? With just scrolls and those big books that you see in movies where the main character slams them on a table and a bunch of dust flies up in the air? I mean, they’re monks, so surely the libraries have booze, right?

(checks the rules, components and double checks with the designer)

No? Huh.

Okay, maybe all board games aren’t exactly prime examples of escapism and palpable themes that create cinematic moments with your friends that you’ll never forget. I mean, this is a hobby where a quarter of the games are about buying stocks in trains and another quarter of the games are about farming. When Uwe Rosenberg comes out with a new game, it’s rarely a question of whether it will be about farming, but about what type of farming it will be (“Hey, did you hear about Uwe Rosenberg’s new game? It’s about pumpkin farming in Minnesota! Instant buy for me.”)

But you know what? That’s okay. Games don’t need themes that can also double as a Wikipedia synopsis for a Steven Segal movie. And Biblios is the poster child for this. Because even though its theme is as dry as the century old scrolls the game shows in its artwork, Biblios manages to be one of the most ass clenchingly tense twenty minutes you can find in the hobby. And I am aware clenchingly is not a word, but that’s how good Biblios is. It demands new words to describe it.

Designed by Steven Finn, who has a reputation for making great filler games, and published by Iello, Biblios is a card game that, as mentioned, has you taking the role of a Middle Ages monk trying to make their monastery’s library the talk of the town. During a time period when the most fun activities were ‘don’t die of the plague’ and ‘don’t die, kind of in general’, you can argue that Biblios is actually trying to capture the more lighthearted aspects of its source material.

The deck of cards that comprises Biblios has different types of scrolls and books, all of which are associated with a color. These essentially make up the five ‘suits’ in the game. In addition to these cards are five colored dice, one for each of those suits. These dice control the points awarded at the end of the game. At game’s end, however many pips are on the die are the amount of points given to the person who holds the majority in that die’s color. So if the blue die is showing four, whoever holds the highest combined value in blue cards gets four points.

So at its core, Biblios is basically just a set collection game. Try to get the most cards in the sets worth the most, right? This game’s easy.

Weeellllll, it’s actually not quite as simple as that.

What separates Biblios from your normal run of the mill set collection game is its two round structure. The first round is called the gifting round, where players take cards from the deck and evenly distribute them between themselves, their opponent(s) and a new deck called the auction deck. Which leads me to the next round, the auction round. In this round, players, unsurprisingly, arm wrestle to gain control of new cards as they’re revealed.

Just kidding, it’s an auction, duh. Though never rule out arm wrestling for an expansion, Dr. Steve Finn, if you’re reading this.

First, let’s begin with the gifting round. Thematically speaking, people from town are coming to your monastery to bestow you with gifts. Mechanically speaking, you’re basically drafting cards from the deck. On your turn, you draw a number of cards equal to the number of players plus one. So in a two player game, you draw three cards from the deck and you must do these three things: give one to yourself, give one to your opponent and put one face down in the auction pile to be auctioned (or arm wrestled, with the inevitable expansion variant) off in the next round. These cards include the aforementioned different suits/colors, but there are also cards with gold (which give you buying power in the auction round) and church cards, where (thematically) you get to gain favor of the head priest allowing you to manipulate the pips on the dice. Which the inclusion of this during this round makes me chuckle, as if the townsfolk are coming to your monastery and just dropping off priests, like they’re parents dropping off their kids at daycare.

“Hi, this is Timmy, he has a peanut allergy and don’t let him have more than three hours of screen time, okay, I’ll be back at four.”

But here’s the catch. Those cards are being drawn one at a time, and you must decide at that instant what to do with it. If it’s a good card, do you keep it for yourself and hope nothing better comes along? Or do you give it to the auction and gamble that you’ll draw something better? And then there is the eternally annoying fact that you have to give something to your opponent. This usually means that the moment you get a low valued card in an any suit, you immediately hand it over to them, making it seem like you are the world’s most passive aggressive monk, giving things because you’re expected to not because you want to. You’re the Middle Ages equivalent of that uncle on Christmas who gives you scratch off lottery tickets as a gift and snidely tells you to not ‘spend it all in one place’.

This drip feed card draft is one of my favorite things about Biblios. It takes the idea of card drafting and turns it into a harrowing game of press your luck. Press your luck is maybe my favorite mechanism in games, so any game that incorporates it is instantly elevated in my eyes. And here, the press your luck is exquisite, a game of chicken where your opponent stares across from you with an expectant grin, just waiting for you to mess up, leaving you no choice but to hand over a high value card into their hand. It creates huge moments of tension, akin to other card game classics such as Lost Cities and Schotten Totten. And after that first ten minutes, you wipe the sweat off your brow, and breathe a sigh of relief as you unclench your buttocks. Then a feeling of terror will envelop you as realize that there’s still a second round to play.

And I mean that in the best possible way. Because as scary as that first round is, the second round-the auction round- is perhaps even more horrifying. Your hand is crafted and you have an idea of what colors you should probably look for, but that doesn’t make what is about to happen any easier. In this round, you shuffle the auction deck that you and your opponents had made and then begin flipping them over, auctioning them off one at a time. The auction then proceeds in turn order, with each player either raising the bid or opting out of the auction. To pay for the cards, you’re bidding the gold you squirreled away in the first round. Umm, you did make sure to keep some gold? Right?

biblios gold — Uhh, I sure hope there is a dollar store in this Medieval village.

The auction creeps along and you are constantly over analyzing and regretting every purchase, meaning Biblios may as well have been called “Buyer’s Remorse: The Game”. By the time you buy two or three cards, you realize your gold is almost depleted and you’re wondering how you are going to stretch out what you have for the rest of the auction. Luckily, there are gold cards in the deck (well, providing you and your opponents were prudent enough to put them in there), which are bought by discarding your other cards, in a clever twist. So that means if you’re short on gold and a 3 value gold (the highest value) pops up in the auction, you can trash cards of colors that you’re fairly certain you’re not going to win. But even that is a risk, because you’re making assumptions on the sets your opponents have built. Educated assumptions, yes, but not perfect. There have been a few games where I trashed cards of a certain color, only to discover I would have won that color if I kept them.

While the gifting round is a white knuckle push your luck drafting system, the auction round is an impossibly tight game of money management. Pay too much for a card, and you lose all leverage for the rest of the round, allowing your opponents to get things for cheap. Don’t be aggressive, though, and you may find yourself waiting for the perfect price for a card that just won’t ever come, especially if you’re playing against savvy bidders that prey on your Scrooge-like skinflint tendencies. I have lost games falling into both traps, and I’ve won games against opponents who have done the same. It’s all about balancing your gold supply with getting the cards you really need. And don’t get me started on the church cards during this round. Those things become so valuable at this stage of the game you and your friends will be clawing each other apart for them like they’re the last Furby on the Toys ‘R Us shelf and not some old white dude in a funny hat.

Furby is still a thing, right? I dunno what Toys ‘R Us sells these days, I haven’t been outside in a while.

By game’s end, after the bidding bloodbath subsides and the dust clears over everyone’s monasteries, you reveal your hands and show who truly has the most of what color. Naturally, this creates lots of groans and cheers, as you see that your opponent managed to get just one more blue than you did even though you wasted all that gold on blue and oh look blue is worth six points and oh hey, they also managed to win red with a measly two cards which I would have beat if I hadn’t discarded them to grab that one gold that I didn’t even spend and ahhhh

Of course, there’s plenty of times where you’ll be the one wearing a smug grin as your opponents regret every decision they’ve ever made in their lives and it’s times like this that reveal just what a devilishly brilliant game Biblios is. Using two very distinct rounds and threading them together in a cohesive and nerve-wracking package, Biblios manages to pack more thoughtful decisions in its lean twenty minute length than some hour long games I’ve played. The fact that it’s done with just a deck of cards and colored dice makes it all the more impressive. Since I’ve entered the hobby a couple years ago, Biblios remains one of my all time favorite card games and almost definitely my favorite set collection game. If you’re looking for a filler with a pair of monk shaped fangs, Biblios is just the game for you.

(Also, I know I’ve been taking the piss (I’m not British, but I love that term, I’m sorry) out of the theme, but I actually like it a lot. For whatever reason, I’ve always liked the imagery of monks in monasteries and the atmosphere that evokes. Combine that with listening to Gregorian chant (yes, really) while my friends and I play this and it really is a theme that I love engrossing myself in).

Mr. Jack Review

mr.-jack-cover.png

When I first got into the board game hobby, I visited a FLGS (or ‘friendly local game store’, to those of you still with lives) in hopes of discovering a cool new game that I had never heard of. Though honestly, at that point, I was spending nearly every waking moment watching board game videos on YouTube and/or lurking on the board games subreddit, so I figured there wouldn’t be too many surprises or games I didn’t know.

I was wrong.

Oh, ohhh sooo wrong.

VERY wrong.

There were just so many games. And so many I didn’t know.

I was overwhelmed when I stepped into the store to find shelves upon shelves upon shelves of foreign names and strange looking boxes. ‘What the hell is an Agricola’ I said as my head spun. ‘Why are there so many trains” I wondered as I stumbled through in a haze. ‘Dear God have I really spent two hours in here, where is my friend’ I worried after checking the time on my phone.

Finally, after cluelessly wandering around for an absurd chunk of time, I decided to sift through games that had interesting looking titles and cover art and cross examine them with their rating on the massive board game site Board Game Geek. If a game didn’t have at least a 7 out of a 10, I kept going. Life is too short to spend your time looking at a mere 6.9 out of 10.

After a while, a game did indeed finally catch my eye. It was called Mr. Jack and the reason it garnered my attention was because it was set in Victorian London (a time period I oh so adore) and the back of the box mentioned deduction. Seeing as how I was still new to the hobby, I had to use touchstones from my years of playing (shiver) mass market games to try and pick games I might like. As a kid, I was obsessed with Clue and since that had deduction, I figured Mr. Jack might be a good fit for me if it too had deduction. It passed the BGG smell test with a 7.1, so I made my first every impulse buy at a FLGS on a game I barely knew anything about.

If you excuse me, I’m going to stick my hand through this time rift I just opened and pat 2015 Kyle on the back because Mr. Jack, to this day, is one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. Hold on, here I go, just gonna put my hand in here and do some patting and AHHHH, WRONG TIME PERIOD, CLOSE THE RIFT, CLOSE THE RIFT.

Phew, okay, if you’re still with me, which means I didn’t create a time paradox so let me get started by actually talking about the game! You know, the whole reason you’re here!

In Mr. Jack, two players take on the role of either Mr. Jack (a.k.a. Jack the Ripper) or the investigator trying to catch him. There’s no mention of the horrendous crimes the real Jack the Ripper committed here, which is probably for the best since murder and dismemberment would be a real downer for this game. Jack’s job is to either keep his identity hidden for the duration of the game’s eight rounds OR escape from the shadows and leave town through one of Whitechapel’s four exits. I’m not sure if the real Whitechapel district in London only has four distinct exits, symmetrically located at its four corners, but I don’t see any reason why the game wouldn’t try to be as historically accurate as possible.

mr. jack board — See? Just like the real Victorian London, but with less lung burning smog and child labor.

Meanwhile, the investigator is trying to determine who Jack is by eliminating suspects one by one until only remains, at which point they need to get another character to hop onto Jack’s head and accuse him like the world’s most eager bunny detective.

The game is played out on a board with lots of hexes, where eight character discs are strewn throughout, patiently waiting for their turn to move. Jack secretly determines which of those eight characters are his secret identity and play begins. Each round, Jack and the investigator move these characters around, and at the end of said rounds, Jack gets asked a very simple question: are you visible or invisible?

While in real life, this would be a weird question for a an actual investigator to be shouting out into the London streets, waiting for a reply like in a childhood game of Marco Polo, it is used here as mechanism in this game to power the game’s deduction system. Jack is visible if his character’s disc is either adjacent to another character disc and/or is adjacent to a lamppost. If he is neither, he is considered invisible. So if Jack takes a look and sees he is currently invisible, he announces as such which prompts the investigator to flip over all discs that are visible to their grayed out side. That means they are eliminated from the possibility of being Jack and the ever shrinking list of suspects gets that much smaller.

Obviously, the deduction in this game is quite simple. It’s literally a 50/50 shot of who gets eliminated and who doesn’t. There certainly won’t be any players standing in front of a bulletin board of multi colored threads webbing out from picture to picture like they’re in a David Fincher film. Even Clue demanded more deductive reasoning than this, but that’s okay. What makes Mr. Jack great isn’t its deduction, but its puzzley gameplay and unique character selection system.

Let’s talk about the character selection first. Every round, four of the game’s eight characters are randomly selected and available to draft. Players draft two of them one by one, in a snake draft fashion. Meaning, the first player in that round takes a character, uses him or her, then the 2nd player gets to take and use TWO characters followed by the first player taking the last remaining. Snake drafts are used in plenty of games (Sagrada and The Grand Austria Hotel come to mind) and I love that drafting system, but the REAL reason why I fell in love with this game is because I’ve never seen another game implement character selection like this. Oh sure, there is role selection in lots of board games, like in the fantastic area control game Mission: Red Planet or the card draft driven Citadels, but in those games you’re simply playing a card and resolving its affects. In Mr. Jack, you aren’t just trying to pick characters based on their triggered ability but also based on where they are on the board.

mr.-jack-discs.png — None of the characters’ activated abilities involve smiling, however.

For example, let’s say you’re Jack and you want to draft Sherlock Holmes to prevent the investigator from taking him and using his ability. Holmes’ ability allows him to look at the top character card from the suspect deck, the same deck Jack drew his initial character from. Seeing which characters are left in this deck allows you to whittle down even further who isn’t Jack. Obviously, this isn’t great for Jack so it’s often a shrewd defensive move to draft Sherlock. Ahh, but maybe Sherlock has already been flipped to his gray side, showing he’s not Jack while the other characters available have unresolved statuses. It seems risky to allow one of those unrevealed characters in the hands of the investigator to move them and ultimately determine their visibility status. But what if they don’t have useful powers for the situation, or their board position doesn’t make for any powerful, swingy moves to your advantage. Deciding a character to draft is often an agonizing choice, because there are so many ripple effects that can occur. And that brings me to the next thing that makes Mr. Jack one of my favorite games: the delightful puzzle that this game presents.

When I introduce Mr. Jack to new players, one of the statements I often start with is “this is basically Clue meets Chess.” No, before you start chortling, this game is not as deep as Chess and that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, it takes the deduction of Clue and puts into a Chess-like puzzle, where certain pieces do certain things and managing them on the board is the key to victory. The above scenario I described is just one of many of these types of decisions. Do you take the character who can move lampposts, using his ability to light a whole group of characters to visibility status? Or do you use the agile Miss Stealthy and use her long range of movement to your advantage? There is a character who is a cop who blows a whistle that allows you to move up to three characters closer to him (because apparently people in Victorian London were part dog).

If you choose him, who are you whistling closer? Every movement is important, and as the investigator you never want to leave anyone too close on the outer edges of the board since that allows Jack to slink into the shadows and escape off the board in a following round. But then that means you’re clumping people together in the center of the board which is a field day for Jack since that means it’s easier to keep as many people visible as possible, meaning you may go an entire round without eliminating any suspects. It’s this hair pulling, teeth clenching tactical Rubics Cube that makes Mr. Jack such a satisfying nut to crack. And despite all these tough decisions and torturous choices, games rarely last more than a half hour, meaning it’s the perfect, “Whaddya say, wanna go again?” game that 2 player games should often strive to be.

Ultimately, if this sort of puzzley game of cat and mouse sounds at all interesting to you, then I can’t recommend Mr. Jack enough. It’s not too complex and while it has a couple of fiddly rules here and there, it’s not enough to dissuade me from even recommending this to gateway gamers. It’s also co-designed by Bruno Cathala, who has since turned out to be my favorite game designer. He has many games that feature tactical and puzzley gameplay loops, so Mr. Jack is a great entry point if you have any interest in joining the Church of Cathala with me. It’s not super expensive to join, and the blood pact we demand requires barely even a quart of blood, so there’s really no excuse to not at least look into it.

Anyway, that about does it for my first review for this blog! I figured Mr. Jack would be a perfect first post since, as I mentioned, it was my first impulse buy when I got into the hobby and it holds a huge nostalgic place in my heart for that reason. If you liked this review, like and subscribe and hit that bell icon and dammit there I go again pretending this is a YouTube channel, ignore me, I’m a moron. If you DO like this though, consider following me on social media (@ElHanlo on Twitter) and staying tuned to future posts and reviews. My plan is to try and post something every Wednesday, so hope to see you there!

Welcome to Boar & Arrow, The Latest Sensation (Probably, Maybe) in Board Game Blogging

Hello! Hi, yes, hello there. I’m Kyle Hanley. I like board games. Like, a lot. Too much, some (mainly my girlfriend (and other friends (and my parents))) might say. When I’m not playing board games, I spend my time wanting to play board games. When I’m not doing that, I spend my time watching board game videos on YouTube. When I’m not doing that, I am buying board games, often online and without adult supervision (big mistake). When I’m not doing that, I am eating Taco Bell.

But yeah, mostly the board game stuff, though.

For too many months, I’ve needed an outlet for this passion (maybe obsession? Nah, passion just sounds much nicer and less serial killer-y, so let’s stick with that). Too long have I been hosting a one person podcast in front of my bathroom mirror, with no microphones, with the faucet running so no one else can hear me, talking about board games to absolutely no one. My sharp critiques, witty banter and contagious enthusiasm is reaching no one through this method. Unless you count the spider in the corner of the bathroom, but I don’t think he even speaks English, so likely not?

That’s where this blog comes in. As a Creative Writing major, I know what it’s like to have a lot of repressed feelings and regret and disappointment that can only be softened through the power of written expression. While this blog will do nothing to help the regret and disappointment, I intend on FINALLY getting my love for board games and my various opinions on them out of my brain and into your eyes. If I have to strap you to a chair and pin said eyes open, Clockwork Orange style, you better believe that I will. But hopefully it won’t come to that!

This blog will be home to reviews, thoughts on news and developments within the board game world, and….uhhh…actually, I don’t know exactly what kind of content I plan on creating for this blog outside of those two things, but I imagine I’ll have plenty of other things to write and say along the way. Worst case scenario, when I run out of board game ideas, there’s always Taco Bell reviews. I am really gunning for this Taco Bell sponsorship, guys.

Now that you have an idea about what this is all about, let me tell you about myself. As I mentioned, I’m Kyle Hanley. You can call me Kyle, you can call me Hanley, whichever you prefer. I like board games. I mentioned that already, didn’t I? I’m no good at this introduction thing. If you think I’m awkward here, try meeting me in real life. By this point in the conversation, I would have started and stopped crying at least three times.

But in all seriousness, some more things about me. As I briefly touched on, I am indeed a Creative Writing major so, as I’m sure you expect, I don’t have a job in writing. I am in fact a substitute teacher. Don’t ask me why anybody would trust me with the lives of 20-25 children on a daily basis because I can barely make a grilled cheese without a trip to the ER. But hey, I don’t complain!

This isn’t my first attempt at blogging. Years ago, I ran a blog where I posted comedic essays and the occasional Onion style satire. It was fine, but I posted far too sporadically to create or maintain any sort of audience. ALTHOUGH, on that very site, I once wrote a blog post about Miley Cryus that got performed by a sketch comedy troupe in New York City. It was pretty neat.

Unfortunately, that blog has become dusty and cobweb ridden, like the salad section at Golden Corral. A lack of focus and consistency made me lose drive for the blog. I would occasionally post about video game things, sometimes a sports thing, and maybe a pop culture thing here and there. There was no theme to the site, and I rarely got more than like 5-10 views per article. It got me down, I’ll admit, and I just didn’t have the motivation to keep it going. That’s where THIS blog comes in.

Gone are the days where I write a blog post about something random every six months and then get down on myself because two of my high school friends are the only people who decided to read it. I have decided I will cultivate a blog with a strong theme and consistent content because life is coming at me fast and I am terrified I will die with absolutely nothing creative attached to my name. Well, except for that Miley Cyrus blog post I mentioned earlier, but who wants Miley Cyrus to be the main part of your writing legacy??

With that idea, I was at a crossroads: what do I focus on in this blog? Then I remembered that I spend almost waking moment thinking about, reading about, and trying to play board games. I realized my decision was kinda made for me.

Here’s what you can expect from this blog. I feel like so much of board game content is video or audio driven. I love me some YouTube videos and podcasts BUT I haven’t seen many people out there creating longform written content. My aim is to fill that hole, writing a blog post on here on a weekly basis. A lot of these will likely be reviews, but I’ll also maybe post essays about news going on in the industry or maybe a list here and there. Whatever it is, it’ll be about board games and it will hopefully be awesome. If it’s neither of those things, I’ll try and do better the next time I make an ill conceived decision to cover board games in the dying form of written media..

Other random thoughts: I’m currently doing this through Word Press because that’s what my last blog was done on and I have experience with it and that’s why I don’t have that whole ‘.com’ thing in the domain name. I know that’s terribly unprofessional and if I can get this site chugging along, I plan to actually spend the money to get that changed. As for the name of this blog itself, it decidedly has nothing to do with games. So many board game content has some sort of pun with ‘board’ in the title or the word ‘meeple’ included somewhere and I have NO problem with that, but I was aiming to have something a little more unique so I don’t get lost in the shuffle. I had a few game based ideas that didn’t include board puns or meeple in it, but ultimately decided to go with Boar & Arrow. What the hell does that mean anyway? Well, my last name is Hanley and the Hanley family crest is a boar sandwiched between two arrows. I quite like the family crest and as a matter of familial pride, I decided to name the site after it. It’s also one letter one away from having ‘board’ in the name, so maybe I will give into societal norms and come up with a board pun at some point. But anyway, we shall see if giving this site a name better suited for an Irish tavern than for a board game blog is the first nail in the coffin!

But that’s about it for now. My plan is to have a review up here very shortly, (MAYBE EVEN TOMORROW??) to give better insight to how my writing style will translate to board game reviews so that you can decide right away whether you wanna board this train. I may not have a British accent like the guys at Shut Up and Sit Down, I may not have as many hats as Tom Vasel, and I may not be as Canadian as Rodney Smith, but I will do my best to give you some great written board game content. I hope you’ll join me on this adventure that will hopefully last for more than three weeks!