Reviews of boardgames. Obviously.
Many, many board games involve the concept of laying down tiles to do a variety of things, such as building the board. Azul, though, actually has you laying down tiles to create a beautiful mural. The reason behind this is that you’re a tile-layer who is to decorate the palace of King Manuel I of Portugal after the King became enamored with azulejos (blue and white tiles, originally) of the Allhambra in Spain.
Who doesn’t love a good circus? Over the years, though, the humble sideshow has faded away because it typically featured oddities and things deigned to be “freaks”. This might have included bearded ladies, giant rats or seemingly possessed items. Barker’s Row reckons these things are good enough to bring back, though. The idea is to put on the best side-show of freaks, oddities, strange monsters and mysterious artifacts that you can, with the first player who fills their cardboard grandstand with paying customers being the winner.
Who knows what wonders the planets hold? I mean, obviously ours has Coke, cakes and video games, so it’s clearly the best, but those other planets out there might hold resources key to improving those things! Better video games, more types of cake, NEW FLAVORS OF COKE! The possibilities are truly endless.
Due to the review copy of Wisdom of Solomon arriving just before the Kickstarter began and the campaign having just six days left as I write this, this is going to be a short review so that you can at least get an idea of how it plays. So let’s just leap head-first into this, shall we? And please, forgive me if my writing is a lot rougher than it usually is, which is certainly saying something.
Peak Oil places you into the shiny, pointed shoes of someone running an oil empire where you must deal with investing in new technology, drilling for oil and then selling that oil before the world has run out of its favorite fossil fuel and will presumably be turning into a post-apocalyptic scenario quite soon, possibly with some guy called Max blasting around. This all takes the form of a worker-placement game where you have to fight for control of a few different locations across the board while fending off the other players.
As a child – which is assuming I’ve actually progressed mentally from that point, which I clearly haven’t – I had freaking loads of teddies in the shape of monkeys and apes that had pride of place on my bed, their job being to defend me from the potential horrors that lurk within dreams and to act as unwilling test dummies for attempts at performing wrestling moves. Years later I found a drawing online of a teddy bear wielding a tiny sword standing over a young girl as a towering monster leans over them. It’s a beautiful little drawing, a perfect illustration of the importance of a teddy bear. And now here we are with a board game that brings this idea to life.
Y’know, it has been a while since I professed my undying and eternal love for Firefly, a cult sci-fi show that didn’t even get to run for a full season before it was callously canceled by those muppets at Fox, a crime so heinous that I still have not forgiven them. The point is for a show that only ran 14-episodes it still managed to spawn a feature film, various comics and now numerous board and card games. That’s a hell of a legacy.
Ah Goblins. They got their big break in the Lord of the Rings movies, really. They’ve always been lurking in fantasy, but when Peter Jackson brought the epic books to life suddenly Goblins were all the rage, with everybody wanting to have them in their games and their books and their movies. And now look at them, the stars of their very own card game that is due to hit Kickstarter on May 6th. But is this a game worth backing? Should you be ponying up some cash?
If you’ve ever played a table-top RPG with a talented gamemaster who has spent many laborious hours crafting an adventure for the whole group to enjoy then you’ll know just how absorbing it can be. Who can count the time you spent forging your character? And all those cool moments where you do something awesome, or some silly plan works out? A good RPG session can be fantastic. It is, however, also a hard thing to get people into. Many of the systems have complex rules, it takes a lot of time to play through, you need the right group of people and so much more.
Games usually get a second print run if they’ve done something right, so this second edition of Kingsburg seems to indicate that when it first came out people must have quite liked it. Me? Well, I’m still a relative noob, so I never played it when it first came out or in the intervening time Now its gotten a bit of a royal makeover with all-new artwork, some rather sexy dice and the entirety of the To Forge a Kingdom expansion rammed into the box for good measure. But thousands of people are wrong all the damn time, so is this dice-placement game actually any good? Have I really been missing out?
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