Boardgame talk for Meeple & People
I admit, I didn’t expect that one day a traditional, competitive eurogame would be in the majority for the Kennerspiel des Jahres selection. But here we are, next to Pandemic Legacy and T.I.M.E. Stories, both cooperative games with a limited number of replays in the box Isle of Skye is the only competitive game with virtually unlimited replayability. Lets have a look if it’s worthy of the nomination.
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World War 3 has come and gone, and to everyone’s surprise we’re not extinct. But the planet is not a great place to live any more, except for those select few that secured a space in the Golden City, the last beacon of civilization in the world. All the wastelanders want to live there, and the players in Raid & Trade actually have the chance to achieve that dream, if they find the right mix between cooperation and ruthlessness.
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The problems with building pyramids don’t start with stacking big stones on top of other big stones. Sure, that’s one problem, but when you get to that point you solved a couple of other things already. Like how to get big stones when all you see around is sand. That part of the operation is the focus of Phil Walker-Harding’s Imhotep: get stones from the quarries down the Nile and to the construction sites, on ships you have to share with other architects working on the same project.
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This is the game you will never find on Google. Because the name of the game is The Game, and that’s just not very distinctive. The Game is a cooperative card game that was nominated for the 2015 Spiel des Jahres. It’s small and abstract, but that doesn’t say anything about how much fun it is.
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The year is god-knows-when BCE. The first people are spreading across the plains and forests looking for two things: food and shelter. Their most important tool in this dangerous voyage are Dominoes-like tiles they use to map out the surroundings. Okay, no, they didn’t really do that. You do that when playing Sapiens, map out the territory for your tribe to prosper.
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The Horribilorum Sorcery Academy for Witty Witches and Wizards, yet another institute of magical learning that not only ignores safety procedures, it’s probably using the handbook to start a fire. This time, students have to sit their Potions exam with ingredients from a rickety, old ingredient dispenser and a professor that actively encourages them to cause explosions in that thing and to drink their own potions they just created to see if they work. Realistically, this game is not about winning, it’s about surviving!
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Uwe Rosenberg is well known for his deep, complex games like Agricola, Glass Road or Fields of Arle. But those are not all he does, he’s equally skilled at small and deceptively simple looking games. In this one, you don’t have to feed your starving farmers, you don’t work and pray in a monastery, you don’t even sell your vegetables at the gates of Loyang. All you have to do is simply make a patchwork blanket.
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It’s safe to say that The X-Files was one of the most popular TV series created to date. (Or maybe still is, with the 2016 revival mini series ending on a huge cliffhanger.) So finding a new The X-Files boardgame published 13 years after the last episode of the original series was aired wasn’t a big surprise. There are millions of people out there with nostalgia for agents Mulder and Scully digging up alien conspiracies, and nostalgia sells. If you know me, then you know that’s why I’m skeptical towards licensed games in general. Nostalgia sells irrespective of quality. But there are good games made on a license, so lets see what side of that spectrum Kevin Wilson’s The X-Files falls on.
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Contrary to most places you go to eat now, modern sushi was originally a type of fast food if Wikipedia is to be believed. It’s thus very fitting that Sushi Go! is a fast food type of game: you play it quickly, with no preparation needed, and then you go back for a second helping. Unlike fast food, however, you don’t have to feel guilty after Sushi Go!, it makes you neither fat nor sick, only entertained.
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Anyone who grew up with a sibling will know the situation: there is ice cream, or cake, or something to be had, one of you had to split it and the other one would get first pick. As it turns out, that system not only works for ice cream but for exploring space ships as well, because that’s how you get your actions in Andromeda.
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