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Tag: Santa Cruz

Spiel des Jahres 2012

Spiel des Jahres 2012

22 May, 2012 Kai Featured, News

We interrupt our regular Tuesday news program for this weeks irregular news program. The nominees for this year’s Spiel des[…]

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Meople News: In the Wilderness, your butler won’t bring you cake

28 February, 2012 Kai Weekly News

Writing the news, I realised I find it awkward to use “pen name” or “nom de plume” when talking about[…]

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Older Reviews

  • Cargotrain

    Trains, pick-up-and-deliver mechanic, set collection. All that doesn’t sound new, the mechanics have been used and even combined before, and there are more than a few train games out there. But Cargotrain takes those simple ingredients and mixes them up into something tasty and fun.

  • Bohemian Villages

    Ah, Bohemia, land of the dice, where the fate of whole families hinges on a few rolls of the metaphorical bones. The locals didn’t mention anything about that when we passed through on our vacation, but it’s probably one of those things you don’t discuss with outsiders. Being a village boy myself, I can relate to that. When someone passed through our village, we also didn’t tell him who’s life had been ruined by the dice. But in Bohemia, or at least in Reiner Stockhausen’s Bohemian Villages, the dice have a much more direct influence on the not-quite-meeple-people’s lives. The dice decide what career they can take and sometimes to which village they have to move.

  • Mafia City

    In a city where the law is nothing but letters in a book, where not only city hall but even the police itself are under the control of rivaling gangs, in a city where everyone with a bit of importance is wearing a fedora – that’s where you play Mafia City.

  • The Gallerist

    Once they get into gaming, most people discover their go-to designers at some point, the handful of designers who’s name is enough to make them buy a game. Vital Lacerda is one of my go-to designers, and so it was only with a slight hesitation that I took the big chunk of cash from my wallet to pay for the huge box that is The Gallerist. And I haven’t regretted the decision since, The Gallerist has exactly what I love Vital’s designs for: finely interwoven game mechanics that seem complex at first, maybe even convoluted, but reveal an elegant design underneath and meaningful, multi-dimensional decisions on every turn.

  • Identik

    Identik advertises itself as “the drawing game for people who can’t draw”. Given my innate artistic ability, I consider that a challenge. Turn out that it actually works: in this hectic party style game, if you can manage stick figures, you can do well. Provided you get obscure details like the number of ears in the picture or the size of the sun right.

  • 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.

  • Blueprints

    “Light dice game” usually implies lots of rolling and very little influence over who wins the game in the end, it’s just whoever rolls better. Not so in Blueprints. There are many dice, sure enough, but you don’t roll them all that much and if you win or not depends less on how you roll them and more on how you use them.

  • Blokus 3D

    It’s the trend of these last two years to slap a “3D” on everything and double the price. We now have 3D movies that no one ever asked for and that force you to do unnatural things with your eyes. We have 3D televisions just to watch those movies. And we have Blokus 3D.

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Older Reviews

  • Thunderstone Advance: Numenera

    Fantasy, in board games, often means “inspired by Dungeons & Dragons”. Until now, that was true for Thunderstone as well. But the Numenera RPG, and the Thunderstone box based on it, offers a very, very different brand of fantasy. You’d be happy to find something as simple as a dragon here.

  • Terra Mystica

    Terra Mystica was the first game by German publisher Feuerland Spiele last year, and to say that it turned out popular is a bit of an understatement. It’s an entirely peaceful fantasy game about colonizing the world, there is no direct conflict, no destroying opposing settlements. But space is very limited and you’ll soon be standing on everyone’s feet. Even more so because the game punishes you for being far away from everyone else. So, did it deserve the rave reviews so far?

  • The Last Banquet

    You don’t often have 25 players to fit into one game. But when you do, what are you going to do? Name one single game that fits that many people and doesn’t involve drinking. Well, we have one for you now.

  • Futschikato / Fuji Flush

    Our first review of a 2016 Essen game is, by necessity, of a light game. We have to play it a couple of times, after all. Futschikato / Fuji Flush, a card game by Friedemann Friese, is as light as any game we ever reviewed, but nevertheless is a really fun game. That’s all thanks to one small twist: low cards can gang up on high cards. No matter how good your card is, you can never feel safe.

  • Imhotep

    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.

  • Romance of the Nine Empires

    The world of Countermay is an odd place. A multiversal crossroads, people from everywhere wash up here, enigmatic aliens right next to undead Egyptians. In their thousand years of war, the Nine Empires have all but killed Countermay, starvation will be the end for everyone unless one Empire manages to be the last one standing. And that’s where you come in …

  • Smash Up: The Obligatory Cthulhu Set

    For a game as mired in pop culture as Smash Up, it was unavoidable that the internets favorite Old One would have an appearance at some point. But is The Obligatory Chulhu Set as great as the Old One himself, or will it cause your descent into madness?

  • Sleuth

    Unusually for a detective game, in Sid Sackson’s Sleuth you won’t care at all for the whodunnit. Your real focus is the whatismissing. And if you played any other of Sackson’s games before, you will already expect that figuring out even that is going to take some brain-sweat. And you’re perfectly right with that expectation, too.

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