Year2018PublisherRepos ProductionAuthorLudovic Roudy, Bruno SautterPlayers3 – 7Age8 – 199Time20StrategyLuckInteractionComponents & DesignComplexityScoreIt’s often one little twist that makes the difference between yet another[…]
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Category: Reviews
Railroad Ink Blazing Red & Deep Blue
Year2018PublisherHorrible GamesAuthorHjalmar Hach, Lorenzo SilvaPlayers2 – 6 (12)Age8 – 199Time20-30StrategyLuckInteractionComponents & DesignComplexityScoreIt’s hard to miss, the roll-and-write renaissance is in full swing.[…]
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Belratti
I admit, there are wide ranges of modern art I don’t get. If you put a piece of butter in a corner you shouldn’t complain when the cleaners remove it. And if you want to pass a picture of a trumpet as a masterpiece, at least write Ceci n’est pas une trompette below it. I don’t want to belittle the choice of artwork in Belratti, but if your paintings are realistic depictions of everyday objects then you don’t get to complain about forgeries.
Art forgery is what Belratti by Michael Loth, winner of the Hippodice Game Contest, is about. The players in the cooperative party game are painters and curators. Curators ask for paintings to be made, the painters provide them. The famous forger Belratti smuggles his own works into the selection, and it’s on the curators to unmask his dastardly works.
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Tsukuyumi & After The Moonfall
One amazing thing games let us do is explore worlds of imagination. Space ships traveling to distant stars are just as possible as dragons or old gods walking the Earth. I can’t think of any game that stretches the borders of imagination as far as Tsukuyumi.
On the surface, the world of Tsukuyumi used to be just like ours. Like Earth, that is. One difference, though – or at least I hope it’s a difference. Thousands of years ago, the white dragon god Tsukuyumi was trapped in the center of the moon by his brothers and sisters. There he lay, plotting, planning, until one day he broke free of his lunar prison by crashing into the Earth. The devastation was absolute. Continents shattered. Mountains crumbled. Oceans fell try. Animals, plants, and especially humanity paid a heavy toll. And amidst all this destruction Tsukuyumi and his army of Oni warriors stand to recapture what was once theirs.
Architects of the West Kingdom
After three games around the North Sea – Explorers, Raiders, and Shipwrights of the North Sea – designer Shem Phillips wanted a change of direction. Literally. So him and co-designer S J Macdonald went to the West Kingdom. The first game in this new trilogy is Architects of the West Kingdom, the sequel Paladins of the West Kingdom was just funded on Kickstarter, we don’t know the title of the third game yet.
The West Kingdom is the 9th century Carolingian Empire, and in the first game the players are architects – don’t act surprised now – construct landmarks and cathedrals for the king.
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Trapwords
I never really enjoyed Taboo much. Once you develop an instinct which words are likely to be banned, it’s actually pretty easy, there are always some people that want to keep playing after I got way bored already, and that buzzer is super annoying. So imagine my lack of enthusiasm when Czech Games Edition announced a game that sounded for all intents and purposes like Taboo with a fantasy theme sprayed on.
Then I actually played Trapwords.
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Pandemic Legacy Season 2
The big question after Pandemic Legacy Season 1 was: How will Season 2 start? Will it assume that we saved the world? That we didn’t? How do you start a second season when everyone’s first season had a different ending?
Well, you’ll have to click to find out. I’m not putting spoilers in the teaser text.
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My Little Scythe
Generally, it’s a great day for any gamer parent when the offspring say “I want to play this one!” Problems arise when “this one” is a game like Scythe, where the rules might just be a bit too much for an elementary school kid and you really want to keep them ignorant of the whole giant war robot thing until they come stomping by the house a year or two down the line. But little Suzy and Timmy are really insistent.
Well, that problem was tidily solved by Hoby and Vienna Chou. My Little Scythe has all the essentials of big Scythe, but trimmed down to a level of complexity that is perfect to play with the wee ones. That isn’t to say My Little Scythe is simplistic or even boring, but being able to explain a game in ten minutes or less is generally a good thing for a family game.
The setting is also more family suitable. Instead of the alternate history 1920 steampunk socialism My Little Scythe takes place in the beautiful Kingdom of Pomme, where animals from the six other kingdoms compete in a friendly tournament to find who will be King or Queen of Pomme for the next year.
Tokyo Highway
You’ve probably seen photos of the crazy highways of Tokyo, with loops of the Shuto Expressway criss-crossing with on-ramps, off-ramps, sideways-ramps and itself in multiple levels. (Not going through any buildings, though. The Gate Tower Building is in Osaka.) The Expressway turned out that way, at least in parts, because of the 1964 Olympic Games. The first bit of Shuto Expressway was opened in 1962, and for the Olympic Games Tokyo wanted to present an efficient, modern transport system. Building this way was the cheap and quick way to have the Expressway connect much of the city.
It’s obvious that there’s a game hidden in that story. Many designers could have done it, had they thought of it. Resource management, worker placement, a tight time limit, contract cards to connect certain neighborhoods… . But many designers didn’t think of it. Naotaka Shimamoto and Yoshiaki Tomioka did, and they made a very different game called Tokyo Highway.
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Mansion of Madness
There are many, many games set in H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos universe, and they trend to be on the large side. Travel around the city, or even the world to stop the Great Old Ones from awakening. The scale makes sense when you consider that Cthulhu was put back to sleep by ramming him with a ship the last time he woke up. And he’s supposed to be small compared to some of the others.
What those games often forget is Lovecraft’s stories are not primarily the giant monster kind of horror. Much of Lovecraft’s writing is more intimate than that. It’s the horror of insanity that you may find, for instance, in the New England countryside. Or in a luxurious mansion anywhere in the world.
Fantasy Flight Games have in their catalog the biggest names of the former kind of game: Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror. But they also have the other side of Lovecraftian horror with Mansions of Madness.
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