A mix of being busy, being tired, and having no ‘proper’ games days or meetups meant that the play count was almost below average for the month of July.
Sure, we had people over, but a Friday night saw just two games played, and later in the month we had a cancelled (and thus converted) D&D afternoon that only brought three games to the table.
Of course the heat doesn’t help. Despite having aircon in the games room, sometimes the heat just zapps any motivation to get up and go out there in the first place.
Of course that didn’t stop big things happening. We had a FROSTHAVEN day that saw us not only tick off five more scenarios, but also got my character, the Banner Spear, to retirement.
And we also got our second play of TWILIGHT IMPERIUM ticked off, but more on that below.
But, as always, let’s see what new games hit the table in the month of July.
This was all over socials during UKGE 2026 and I knew I’d be grabbing it some point. When I spotted the only copy left on the shelf at the Southampton Waterstones, I took it as a sign and hurried to the checkout.
What is BOOKSELF? Well, it’s more tin box dexterity from Alley Cat Games, similar to TINDERBLOCKS and BARBECUBES. The difference here is that you’re stacking wooden books on shelves.
The books are different sizes and the shelf cards require a certain amount of them to be placed on specific spots, marked with an X.
You also have to place books simultaneously with another player which adds an extra level of danger. You’d better make sure you have the balance planned out.
And to make it tougher, there’s a wooden cat meeple that must be moved up a shelf once the books are place.
It’s a tough one. Definitely tougher than it looks. I really enjoyed our couple of plays (one was so close to a win!). The only thing I find odd is that it’s cooperative, and that you place at the same time. It’s awkward, especially two people placing three or more books at once.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about this 2-player only game (that can be played at 4 in the same way as WAR OF THE RING or STAR WARS REBELLION can) and I have had my eye on it for a while. So it was foutunate that it ‘fell‘ into my online basket when I preordered WINE & CHEESE.
The main crux of the game is the tug of war over five planets. To win the game you either need 3 of the same planet, 4 different planets, or any combination of any 5.
You play cards from your hand on your turn, the colour of the card matching the planet you want to affect, and then pull that planet one spot towards you. After that, the cards all have a bunch of actions you get to trigger.
But the cards cost credits to play, so you might not always be able to do what you want. You also have a tight hand limit meaning that you might not even have the coloured cards you need to pull the planet that sits just one step away from being yours.
On top of all that, the cards have other uses when discarded instead. There are three factions symbols in the game, so when you discard a card, this faction symbols lets you activate a specific section from one of the two end boards.
There is the tech board which gives you better bonuses the higher you climb each of it’s three tracks. And there is another board that gives you resources, cards, or credits when you’re running low. This action also gives you a token that increases you hand limit, but this can quickly be taken away.
Over all it was a fun first play. The number of icons is perhaps the biggest hurdle. It’ll take a few plays to internalise these. But the tactical tug of war is fun and I like the art and design.
We had @ice_n_dice_games over for a games evening last month and he brought this cute little tableau builder with him after not getting it played since he picked it up at Essen.
Each turn the active player drafts a number of cards (in our case it’s three, but I don’t think it changes for 4-player), then chooses one to keep before passing one of the remaining two cards to each neighbour.
Each player than has three choices; recycle the droid for it’s parts, use parts you already have to repair the droid and keep it in front of you, or discard it in order build one of the house cards that sit between players.
It’s pretty simple to play, and some turns you won’t have a choice of what to do with your card because you have no resources, or your full up and can’t take any more (resource storage is limited, but does expand throughout the game).
You could ‘hate’ draft when you’re the active player by looking at your opponent’s tableau, making sure you give them a card they can’t afford to replair. But it’s only worth while if the other cards you drew don’t matter to you.
The droid cards are coloured coded depending on what they specialise in. Blue are just points while green give points towards an end of era majority (which happens three times, I think). The big draw of the game is the adorable droid art. They all look super cute, and the artwork itself is really good.
My wife already owned this when we met. It was a game she’d played with her sister and brother-in-law years earlier.
When she first showed it to me, I knew absolutely nothing about it, but was immediately hooked on giant mech samurai. The game has really cool minis, and it’s from Plaid Hat Games (makers of one of my all time favourite games).
Yet, for reasons unknown, it has sat on our shelves, following my wife through two house moves, and mostly just gathering dust. And this is after I tracked down the expansion as a gift for her too!
Just over six years since I first discovered it’s existance, I finally read the rulebook, refreshed my wife on how it played, and got to work battling mechs.
And it could not have been a bigger disappointment.
I’ll add a disclaimer here to state that I think it would have been better with more than 2-players. It’s an area majority game at it’s (armoured!) core and these never work well unless specifically designed for it.
Those beautiful plastic mechs? They don’t really fight. They just add a big number to a planet area, a bigger number than your Carriers and Fighters do. And they have an abilitiy that might be useful.
Each planet board has eight spaces, and you’re using your four actions per round to get the most influence (?) points on each planet. You also have cards you can play to mix things up and change the balance of power at crucial moments.
Like I said, it’s not terrible. At 3 and especially 4, I can see it getting quite messy (in a good way) as multiple players fight for control. With the winner exciting, you don’t really lose, because your forces stay put and now you have an advantage for the next round.
But at two it was rubbish. My wife kept playing cards that undid my majority, and the game ended 94-37. I managed to actually win a single planet in the final round, but she’d pretty much lapped me in points by then.
I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it because I lost. I didn’t enjoy it because when you’re losing, it’s hard to come back without other players occupying the leaders attention. But more than that, it did a ‘Reign of Fire’, not fullfilling the promise of its cover. It was less ‘Mech Battles’ and more ‘Mech Staring Contest’.
We were closing in on the end of our 52×1 challenge (we work to average one new game per week) and we decided to get through some smaller games we still hadn’t tried played yet.
Now, we’ve played TINDERBLOX before, and this Storm Edition isn’t much different at all. But it does add these rain cubes that can come up on certain cards. As these rain cards come up, you have to place more based on how many have come before.
The rain cubes are about the same size of the flame cubes, but they are plastic instead of wood. So they are different enough to mix things up when it comes to balancing.
The big selling point of this version though is that it’s water proof, though I have not tested this yet because I belong indoors. And also, I’ve forgotten what rain is.
Another one of the influx of ButtonShy games I’ve grabbed over the last couple of years via their Kickstarter campaigns. I’ve mostly been focusing on their solo games, but the theme and art pulled me towards this 2-player only release.
On your turn you draft a card and chose which act (column) to put it in on the table in front of you. The aim is to score the best three act play by the end of the game with the nine cards you draft.
But the cards have two purposes. The bottom half of all the cards has three icons in a row. As you place other cards over the top, you’ll stagger them so that, at the end, you’ll have nine symbols in a grid for each act.
The cards that sits on top of the column will have a scoring rule. It will be a pattern of the symbols. So sword, skull, skull. You’ll want to have placed your drafted cards to make up as many of that pattern as possible to score it efficiently.
But you have a scoring rules card for each of the three acts. Plus some cards have bonus scoring (most skulls showing, or having no pots showing). So basically you need to know what you’re scoring as you go and hope you can draft the right cards for it.
Of course you could draft a card, cover the top card (as long as the column doesn’t exceed three) and change the scoring rule.
I liked it, more than I’ve liked other recent ButtonShy releases. It’s short and sharp and works well at 2. It might get stale after a while, but I have two expansions to add in if and when that time comes.
Normally when we reach the end of a challenge (in this case it was new game 52 of our 52×1 challenge) I make it something big. You know, go out with a bang.
But I’d been wanting to try WAYPOINTS for a while. It’s from Postmark Games, who made the excellent VOYAGES. It is simply a sheet of paper and some rules. You supply the dice and the writing impliments.
It’s a Roll ‘n’ Write. Someone rolls a D6, and then you count along this track to see how many movement points you have based on the weather.
Sunny means you’ll be able to walk further. Wind and rain will slow you down. From there you draw a line to mark your route across the map, going from one waypoint to another.
And this is what I really liked about WAYPOINTS; your lines don’t have to be straight. It’s the map’s grid lines and contours that cost movement points to cross. But you can draw a decent length line while walking on flat ground. It’s difficult to really explain the impact this has, but it’s really cool having these lines that don’t feel constained.
Other than that, it’s typical Roll ‘n’ Write fare. There are different types of waypoints. Focusing on a few will see them give better rewards as apposed to if you dip your toes in everything.
There are gliders to give free movement from mountains, photos for bonues, lakes to fill up your water bottle (dice mitigation).It’s a great addition to the genre.
Deck Building is my second favourite mechanic. While watching a couple of interviews from David at Neon Gorilla, ASCENSION was mentioned quite a bit with the guests he had on.
ASCENSION was a game name I’d heard of, but really didn’t know anything about. And when I dug into it a little more, I saw why.
The game originally came out in 2010, and while they are just fullfilling a 5th edition via crowdfunding, it doesn’t really exist in retail anymore.
Again, I love Deck Building games, and ASCENSION is a keystone of the genre, so I knew I wanted it. Thankfully the 4th Edition (aka the 10th annivesary) is available, and so I grabbed it.
Stepping from beneath the shadow of DOMINION, this is the game that gave us random market rows, attacking things, and having you main points not clog up your deck.
I really enjoyed our first play. It’s a little smoother than STAR REALMS (the game that got me into the genre) yet remains a race for points like DOMINION. I like that you can always attack the Cultist so that attack cards are not wasted if you don’t have enough to face the monsters in the market row. I like the art. And I can’t wait to play again.
It’s just a shame that I can’t get hold of any of the expansion packs.
I first spotted this quirky 2-player game during the CONTAINER crowdfunding campaign, but waited for retail to grab my own copy.
It’s basically chess in ridiculus cartoon war art. It’s a style I really like.
Players go head-to-head with matching units (trrops, trucks, tanks, and planes) and try to be the first to either gain three of five starts, or get their commander to the enemy spawn area.
It took a while for us to get our heads around the rules for the pieces. The basic turn is just that; basic. You move and then add more troops to the battlefiled. But the rules for the units themselves are fiddly.
It was a few rounds of constantly referring to the help sheet to find out what moves where and what kills what.
But, for such a small and cartoony game, it’s quite cuthroat and full of tough choices. Every time you put a vehicle out, you decide it’s purpose on the battlefield. Will it deploy troops? Will it stop planes flying over?
And to make things tougher, only the infantry pieces come back to you when they get taken out. Each vehicle (and attachment) is lost.
Overall I really enjoyed my first play. The only issue is the playmat. It’s basically a creased teatowel, on where the folds prevent units from standing up properly. We could iron it, but then it has to be folded to fit back in the box. I think cardboard tiles would have been better so that the map was made witha 3×2 grid.
We’ve really enjoyed BEER & BREAD, a 2-player only game that sees you making . . . beer and bread. It has nice, multi-use cards, an interesting score mechanic, and tight resource management.
It’s spiritual successor, WINE & CHEESE is very similar in most respects, but leans away from the card play and brings along some aggresive Worker Placement.
The game sees players using their workers to gather resources that they’ll then use to make wine and cheese. But this time round things need to be given time to age if you want to get the maximum money for them. So your cellar slots (start with 5 but can get a 6th) can get full up as you wait for the predetermined ‘Aging’ phases to come along.
But there are ways to control the aging; speeding it up or slowing it down. Timing is everything in this game.
I will say that the rule book is a rough one. There weren’t any english language ‘How To Play’ videos available at the time we played it, and the rule book is all over the place. I don’t know how we managed to get through our first play as smoothly as we did.
But the game is a good one. You’ll get punished for rushing your decisions. Worker Placement is key to success and not just what you gain. The games has a mechanic in it’s Worker Placement that sees players alternating in a fun way. Based on the colour of the meeples, what the first player places dictates what the second player gets to do. But then they choose the next meeple from their side, thus dictating what Player 1 does on their next turn.
It might take a few turns to get your head around it, but eventually you’ll be paying as much attention to what you’re allowing your apponent to do as you are to what you’ll be gathering.
While we had a couple of friends visit on various days, our biggest ‘event’ was getting the group back together (and adding one more) for our second ever play of TWILIGHT IMPERIUM. Despite me picking up a copy in the early days of the Pandemic, I didn’t manage to get it to the table until last October.
I was adamant that it didn’t avoid the table for many more years and so we got a game in last month (I’m sure the lure of our aircon during the heatwave had nothing to do with it 😂).
It was epic, obviously. I was hemmed in pretty early, with my wife being aggresive on the left, while galaxy features and my borther-in-law’s fleet blocked the way to the right. I knew I wasn’t going to win fairly early on, but my main objective was to beat my atroscious previous score. And I managed. In fact, I did well enouigh to almost be in contention for the win if we’d had one more round.
It was a much better experience this time round. That’s not to say that our first play was terrible. But obviously we were learning. Mistakes were made. And, more importantly, not every action card was selected this time round because we were playing at 5 and not 4. it made a big difference.
Of course, there was meta from our previous game, so my wife could barely open her mouth without the whole table immediately preparing for war against her. Alliances were made, borders were crossed, and Mecatol Rex was taken (and held against an absolute onslaught). It was a really fun game, lasting about 7 hours.
I can’t wait to do it again.
I also managed to get a couple more videos uploaded in July.
First up was the next installment of my ‘5 Great Games . . .’ series. I originally planned to cover solo games, but switched to Roll ‘n’ Writes are the last minute. I could not tell you why.
I also finally got to cover DOMINION after Rio Grande games sent me the big box earlier this year. I already had the base game and really enjoyed it, but when the big box turned up, we definitely got it to the table more and it’s quickly become a favourite of mine.
My final video of the month saw me cover a bunch of games from my son’s collection. Over the last few years I’ve been getting him kids versions of classic games like CARCASSONNE and TICKET TO RIDE.
Always Play Blue 