Boardgame talk for Meeple & People
Some games are huge and take a long time to play. Others are smaller and quicker. And then there are some games that advertise themselves as mini games: small box, small rules, short play time – all the fun. Iello have their own product line of such games, and Welcome to the Dungeon is one of them. A quick and simple bluffing game that has little in common with dungeon crawling style games, you will try to get the hero killed more often than you help him succeed.
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Some countries just don’t manage to form a stable government, but the unnamed kingdom of Council of Four is ridiculous even by those standards. Influential merchants, the players, exchange councilmen in any way that best serves their interest. If the current council can’t be bullied into writing a business permit, they just replace them. And whoever does that best wins the game.
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I still think Vlaada Chvátil has this little check list on his desk where he goes “Oh, here’s a genre I didn’t make a game in yet” and then just sets out to design a game for that genre. And whatever genre he picks, he’s good at it. The latest example of that is Codenames, a word association game. And if you think that word games are boring, like I did, then maybe Vlaada can change your mind.
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Mighty empires are fighting for supremacy over the ancient world. But where once up to seven empires where in contest, now there are only two. 7 Wonders: Duel condenses the action of 7 Wonders into a two player game, playing in two being the one weak spot 7 Wonders always had. To make that happen, many things had to change, but the game remains the same.
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There have been many different ideas to spice up trick-taking games over the years. Black Hat’s way to do that is to add a game board where you move your pawns when you take a trick. A lot then depends on proper timing, you want to take a trick when moving on the board is the most beneficial for you.
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Being a merchant in the bazaar of Istanbul is a demanding job, and some days you just can’t do it without some chemical stimulation. With the new expansion to Mocha & Baksheesh, you can finally have your coffee in Rüdiger Dorn’s Istanbul. But it’s not for you to drink and gain energy for additional actions, it’s another commodity for you to trade in on your quest for rubies. But does coffee really make everything better?
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Wizards never live in peace. Wherever they meet, they fight. Heroes is another game to prove this simple fact, and it packs the excitement of a real-time game into the wizard duel, because players roll at the same time, trying to collect the energy to cast a spell before their opponent does.
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Usually, when a game tells you to create your own legend, it doesn’t mean you should kill the people participating in it. But when the game is named after the Greek underworld for heroes and demigods it was predictable that they would have to get there somehow, and the usual way is dying. But at least they will contribute to your legend and maybe help secure your place on Olympus.
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