Cerebria: The Inside World

Year2018PublisherMindclash GamesAuthorRichard Amann, Viktor Peter, István Pócsi, Frigyes Schöberl, Nick Shaw, Dávid TurcziPlayers1 – 4Age14 – 199Time60-120StrategyLuckInteractionComponents & DesignComplexityScoreInside every one of us, powerful forces are[…]

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Wingspan

So, you build engines from shiny, new metal parts? That would make you a mechanic or an engineer. You build them from bits of old engine? A game show candidate, maybe? Engines from bamboo and coconuts, you say? Why, hello there, Gilligan. You build engines from birds? Then… um… I don’t know… I guess you’re about to receive an angry visit from PETA, if not the police. You’re also a peerless genius of a mad scientist. Or you might just be playing Wingspan, an engine building game by Elizabeth Hargrave and this year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres winner.

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Pandemic Legacy Season 2

The big question after Pandemic Legacy Season 1 was: How will Season 2 start? Will it assume that we saved the world? That we didn’t? How do you start a second season when everyone’s first season had a different ending?

Well, you’ll have to click to find out. I’m not putting spoilers in the teaser text.

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My Little Scythe

Generally, it’s a great day for any gamer parent when the offspring say “I want to play this one!” Problems arise when “this one” is a game like Scythe, where the rules might just be a bit too much for an elementary school kid and you really want to keep them ignorant of the whole giant war robot thing until they come stomping by the house a year or two down the line. But little Suzy and Timmy are really insistent.
Well, that problem was tidily solved by Hoby and Vienna Chou. My Little Scythe has all the essentials of big Scythe, but trimmed down to a level of complexity that is perfect to play with the wee ones. That isn’t to say My Little Scythe is simplistic or even boring, but being able to explain a game in ten minutes or less is generally a good thing for a family game.
The setting is also more family suitable. Instead of the alternate history 1920 steampunk socialism My Little Scythe takes place in the beautiful Kingdom of Pomme, where animals from the six other kingdoms compete in a friendly tournament to find who will be King or Queen of Pomme for the next year.

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Brass: Lancashire & Birmingham

It is the eighteenth century and the skies darken over England. That’s not a metaphor for anything, nor is it talking about the typical English weather. The Industrial Revolution has begun and coal smoke blackens the air and lungs of England.

The original Brass turned ten years old last year, but the game by Martin Wallace still holds a proud overall rank 24 on BoardGameGeek at the time of writing. Not bad in a time where new games are so numerous that many won’t even be remembered ten years from now.

Two new editions by Roxley are a great opportunity for us to review this modern classic. Technically it’s Brass: Lancashire that is a new edition of the original Brass, Brass: Birmingham is more like a spin-off. However, the two games are so similar in rules and theme that we decided to put them in one review and highlight the differences.

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Bronze

The Bronze Age was the beginning of empires on Earth. Political and cultural units larger than just one settlement started appearing anywhere people can live. Larger cities happened. Trade between them became essential. And with trade the empires spread further.

With Bronze you get the chance to spread your own Bronze Age empire, not in a big, complex civilization builder but in a quick, streamlined game with simple rules but complex decisions. Everything you do seems trivial, but there are many consequences attached to your choices.

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Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg

The Quedlinburg Quacks are not the east German town’s hockey team. Neither are the Quacks of Quedlinburg a family of celebrity ducks living in the area. I would love if they were, though. No, The Quacks of Quedlinburg (original title: Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg, no official English title yet) is one of Wolfgang Warsch’s games on this year’s Spiel des Jahres shortlists. We already reviewed the others (Ganz Schön Clever and The Mind), so today we’ll talk about quacks and snake oil salesmen.

The players in Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg are charlatans selling their potions and tinctures at the annual fair in Quedlinburg. At least, they will sell them if they manage to make them without blowing up their kettle. Spoiler: they won’t. Not reliably. The possibility of your kettle exploding is the fun. And the best part: when it does explode you have no one to blame but yourself.

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Pulsar 2849

Pulsars are certain types of stars that emit a tight beam of electromagnetic radiation. The beam doesn’t really pulse, it just appears that way because a pulsar rotates with a frankly ridiculous speed and we can only detect the beam when it’s pointed our way. Now, something the size of a star rotating in a matter of seconds or even milliseconds, that’s a lot of energy. And where is a lot of energy there are people thinking how to harvest it. Harvesting energy from pulsars is a wee bit beyond our current technology. But in the future, like, maybe in the year 2849?

Building pulsar-powered power plants, so called gyrodynes, is your job in Vladimír Suchý’s Pulsar 2849. A gyrodyne is basically a stellar scale dynamo, a ring built around a pulsar that turns with the force of the rotating star and transmits the energy generated elsewhere. But what powers the construction of a structure of that magnitude? Dice!

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Video Review: Arena – For the Gods

If you compare mythologies from all over the world two things quickly become obvious. One, the gods get bored easily. Two, they don’t have the attention span for complex entertainment. A game where heroes bash each others head in for the glory of the gods is exactly their kind of fun. Which brings us to this video review of Arena: For the Gods.

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Update: Clans of Caledonia

It’s been almost a year since we reviewed Juma al-JouJou’s Clans of Caledonia. Our review back then was based on the Tabletopia version of the game because the Kickstarter for the physical edition had just started. We’ve spent some time playing the paper-and-wood edition since then and it seems like a good time for an update.

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