Perpetual-Motion Machine, the new game by Ted Alspach, has nothing to do with physics, despite the title. Instead, it’s a set collecting game shooting for poker hands, where playing a hand lets you improve one attribute of your game play.
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Category: Reviews
i9n
i9n, or "Information" is a deduction game that uses punch cards to give new, hidden information during the game. It also adds some strategy and a bit of luck to the mix, making it a very fun game that certainly won’t be the last one to employ this new mechanic.
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Kingsburg
Kingsburg is a medieval dice-fest about building up your shire (no, not The Shire, but you can always add a bit of roleplay if you want) and defeating demons and dragons that attack each winter, all through bribery at the court. It seems the ends do justify the means here.
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Palazzo
Palazzo is a fun, quick auctioning game with a slightly mathy scoring system. It has a theme – or so I’m told – something about building houses in Florence, but it doesn’t really matter much.
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Witch of Salem
The Witch of Salem is one of many board games set in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and its art really makes that world come to life. Four scholars of the paranormal set out to keep the Great Old Ones imprisoned in R’lyeh. Will they succeed?
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Metropolys
Metropolys – easily recognised as one of Ystari’s games by the trademark Y – is an auction game with not too complex rules but some interesting scoring trade-offs. It also features a very unique and appealing artistic style.
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Chrononauts
Remember history lessons from school? Yeah, me neither. Too many dates to remember. So how about we just go and mix up history until it matches the answers that we thought were right?
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Quarto
An abstract strategy game by Gigamic from 1991. The rules are explained in about 2 minutes, but that doesn’t mean the game is easy to play. Expect to put some brain juice in order to win.
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Tombouctou
Tombouctou from 1993 thematically sounds like a caravan trading game, but it turns out to be a deduction game where you protect your cargo from thieves by figuring out where they strike first.
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Dixit
Dixit is a very creative communication game that has you describe and guess at picture cards. It’s much more fun than this description sounds, fun enough for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award.
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