Quarter of the year gone by and winter is definitely behind us now as the sun is beginning to come out. We’ve had a great month of gaming with a visit to CajunCon (an Instagram meetup that didn’t require us to drive for 2 hours plus).
We’ve also been having a lot of fun with our D&D group (I’ve waited four decades to be playing the game this way) and our seperate Numenera group, so RPG’s are a big part of our lives now (there will be an upcoming post on that around the middle of the year).
But enough of that. Lets see what turned up, and what got learnt.
KICKSTARTER ARRIVALS
The month started with the arrival of a small box card game called PARTISAN. The designer of the game is someone I met online a couple of years ago when I was just getting into D&D. Todd was beginning to run regular online One-Shots for new players as a way to help people get into the RPG and I joined for a few sessions. The game of PARTISAN is a 1v1 assymetrical card game that sees players face off as rival factions and it’s great to see his project out in the wild.
My current oldest outstanding Kickstarter also arrived this month. BARDWOOD GROVE is from Final Frontier, and it falls into the catergory of ‘games i’ve gone cold on since the campaign ended a long time ago’. After our disappointment with the final product that was MONSTERS ON BOARD, I started to get nervous about how BARDWOOD GROVE would turn out. Couple that with delays, changes that the community didn’t like, reference boards that are different to the final rule book rules, and an insert that causes lid lift with just the base game stuff included. Needless to say, the interest I had in this game back in Nov 2021 had faded. Definitely one of my least favourite campaigns that I’ve backed.
NEW GAMES OF THE MONTH
On the Easter Monday we had some friends over for some board gaming follwed by more of our current D&D campaign. We’re all fans of Critical Role, so it was fun that the first game we learnt and played was UK’OTOA. It’s all about surviving the destruction of your ship, but it has a fun little mechanic where you’re working with two player colours and have two ‘teammates’ (players to your left and right) until the colour you share with them is completely gone. It has a SURVIVE: ESCAPE FROM ATLANTIS mixed with BETWEEN TWO CITIES vibe and I like it.
BOHNANZA is a classic that I’d always wanted to try but never bought it due to it needing a decent player count to enjoy. A few weeks previous, my wife made the mistake of leaving me unattended in the Southampton Waterstones where I picked up this, 6NIMMT! and SKULL KING. With five of us around the table on Easter Monday, it seemed like a good time to try it. And I can see why it’s still around since the late 90’s as it’s really simple to teach and has fun interaction between players as everyone begs people to take their unwanted beans while everyone fights over them. Or not.
A Cthulhu twist on a spelling game, UNSPEAKABLE WORDS sees players using the letters in their hand of cards to spell words. Each letter is worth a number and adds to the total score of your word. But before you can continue, you must roll a D20 and hope you roll equal to or higher than your word score. If you fail, you lose some sanity, and when you lose all of your sanity, you’re out.
On the first Saturday of the month we ventured off to CajunCon which was being held in honour of @the_cajun-gamer visting the South of England. HABITATS was the first game we were introduced that day. It’s a fun tile pick up game where you’re all driving jeeps around the wild and collecting animals, flowers, and other tiles that will score you points. Each tile you take is placed in front of you to form your own nature park. It’s a beuatiful looking game and we picked it up very quickly.
While we had a small gap before a bunch of us headed off to the local chippie, @trywingames taught a group of us a small box push-your-luck game called MY GOLD MINE. It’s super simple and reminded me of DIAMANT. Players start in the middle of a row of tiles. Dragon is one way and escape is the other. But the lure of gold along the way can be tempting, causing you to choose between leaving the caverns empty handed, or steping closer to barbacue central in order to grab some gold first. There’s a little player interaction allowing some mischief and it makes for a nice filler game.
Ever since I started listening to the Meeple2Meeple podcast, I’ve wanted to try OBSESSION. So when at a gaming meetup with the games two biggest fans and having access to one of three copies of the game, it just had to happen. And what a game. Absolutely loved the tight economics, asymetrical starting powers, and having to plan the usage of your workers as they have a recharge process before you can get them back. Definitely want to play this again, and I can guarantee it will be in our collection before the end of this year.
Our final game of the CajunCon meetup was PHANTOM INK. I’ll be honest and say I didn’t think I’d enjoy this deduction game, especially at just 4-player. But it was a lot of fun and worked well even at that lower player count.The clue cards allow a little bit of silly with the vagueness to some words and it’s fun to steal a win from the opposition.
I really can’t get enough of the Valeria games from Daily Magic Games, and GUILD ACADEMIES OF VALERIA was the latest addition to our collection. It’s once again pivots around the custom Valeria dice (like SHADOW KINGDOMS OF VALERIA) and sees players recruiting students to be trained up and venture out on quests. It also has two different mechanims for deciding your personal end of game scoring, which I really like.
Following our disappointment with the finished product that was MONSTERS ON BOARD, I wasn’t looking forward to Final Frontier Games latest, BARDWOOD GROVE. The campaign itself also didn’t fill me with hope that the company were improving on previous product quality. Yet despite a few issues (the Boom Box is a massive fail and there is indeed a little lid lift due to poor insert design), there is an okay game here when all is said and done. Players guide their Bards around the region, gathering resources so that they can maximize actions on the four corners of the space they’ve landed on. The gameplay has some issues that might affect longevity (I’m not a fan of the range stones mitigating positioning, the board is still messy despite their attempt to ‘clean it up’, and some bards powers are better than others). But I do like unlocking content over several plays to learn the game slowly and overall we did enjoy our first play.
ISTANBUL has been in my collection since being my final Sunday purchase at UKGE 2022. How it’s taken me this long to learn and play it I don’t know, but what a great game. Trying to plan your optimal route to resourses and gems while other players get in your way or beat you to it makes for dynamic gameplay, and the fact that you can have so many different layouts to the tiles means you’ll need to adapt each game.
HIGHLIGHTS
- A Games Day and D&D Evening on the Easter Bank Holiday
- Attending CajunCon and meeting PJ (@cajungamer)in real life
- Being able to attend our local game group meet up for the first time in 2024
Always Play Blue 