Similo

How many different faces are there, really? You get men or women, young or old, blond or brunette, dark-skinned or light, wearing a hat or not – if you want to get really exotic you might consider cat faces, wolf faces, green faces, blue faces. So let’s say there are like, thirty different faces in the world. That seems a lot already. And then let’s say there are that many again, because there are two sets of Similo cards: History and Fables.
How are you supposed to find one specific face out of all of those, when the one person who knows who you’re looking for can only give cryptic clues? Why, by deduction, of course!

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Silver Amulet / Silver Bullet

I’m starting to wonder if Ted Alspach had some bad (or maybe very good?) lycaontrophic experiences in his youth. He created Ultimate Werewolf, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Ultimate Werewolf Legacy, and a bunch more, what are the odds the neighbors’ dog didn’t whisper dark secrets to him?

Ted’s newest take on the lupine exposure genre is the Silver series, so far containing Silver Amulet and Silver Bullet and soon to be joined by Silver Coin. The furry beasts in these games are much more insidious than usual, though. In the Silver games, people are not simply werewolves or not werewolves. Werewolves exist on a gradient from “not a werewolf” all the way to “holy crap, that is absolutely a werewolf”. Finding the most werewolf group of people will be a challenge under those circumstances.

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The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

First of all: the game’s title is wrong. In my heart of hearts, Pluto will always be the ninth planet. So what we’re looking for in The Crew is planet TEN. Come fight me about that, International Astronomical Union!
With that challenge out of the way, welcome to our review of The Crew: The Quest for Planet NineTen. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what you’ll be doing in this game. As a crew of astronauts the players go hunt for Planet NineTen.
More surprising is how you go on that epic quest. Trick taking games are not a traditional medium to tell a story, nor are they commonly cooperative. But I’ve gushed before how incredibly versatile that simple game mechanism is.

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L.a.m.a.

Lama is the German word for llama. No big conceptual leap there. L.a.m.a. is, at least in Reiner Knizia’s vocabulary, an abbreviation for “lege alle Minuspunkte ab”. Discard all minus points. You could translate the title by its abbreviation, but then an eventual English edition would be called D.a.m.p., and whatever depiction you pick for that would be much less adorable than the crazy llama L.a.m.a. has. And so the international publishers have stuck with the adorable tylopod.
Linguistics lesson aside, L.a.m.a. is a small box card game that is nominated for the Spiel des Jahres this year. Not at all bad for a relatively simple shedding game and worth a look what makes it special.

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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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Flee

As a reviewer, games where you discover new content and new rules while you play are frustrating. On the one hand, they are awful. How do you review a game with a Legacy or Fast Forward mechanism without giving away all the good bits? On the other hand, they are great, simply because discovering new things while you play works that fingerboard that is our brain’s reward mechanism so well. Or, in plain English, they’re one hell of a lot of fun. And we love to talk about fun games. So be warned, ahead you will find very mild spoilers for the first few rounds of Friedemann Friese’s Flee.

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DIG

Anything worth doing is worth doing as a contest. Running? Sure. Jumping? Certainly. Rolling dice? Well, duh.Throwing typewriters? It’s been done. Digging? I’m not sure if it’s been done before, but now there’s DIG, so you can do it in the comfort of your own home. It should have been obvious that there would be an annual digging contest somewhere in the multiverse. This one is only for the bravest of adventurers. The Hill has treasures aplenty, but it also has monsters, cave-ins, and your competitors.

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Fortress

With last year’s Fabled Fruit Friedemann Friese developed an alternative to the Legacy system for games that keep changing every time to play. It’s lighter than a Legacy game, you don’t have to rip up any components or glue stickers to them, and you can completely reset the game by sorting a stack of cards. Yet you still get a game that will keep you busy for quite a while before you discovered everything it has to offer. A game that keeps surprising you, at least the first time you play all the way through.

Fabled Fruit was successful enough – and Friedemann had enough fun making it – to spawn a series of games with the same system, now dubbed the Fast Forward system: Fear, Fortress and Flee. In fact, the Fast Forward games even go one step further than Fabled Fruit did: they don’t give you any rules to read before you start playing. All you do is put the big stack of cards on the table and start drawing cards. When you get to a card with rules you read it out loud and put it on the table for everyone to see. The rules on that card are in effect from that moment on.

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