Gingham

• Designer: Robert Hovakimyan 
• Publisher: Bitewing Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 20-40 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/48Jo2I0
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The race is on! Ants have found an abandoned picnic blanket ripe with sweets, but there aren’t enough for every colony… 

Gingham is a tricky game of confection connection. In this game, players position their queens around the gingham picnic blanket and deploy their ants to connect sweets and claim the stockpiles they create.

Gingham is the second title in Bitewing Games’ Travel Line. This line of games is focused on being supremely easy to play with anyone, anywhere.

Continue reading →

1906 San Francisco

• Designer: Perepau Llistosella
• Publisher: Looping Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Early morning, 18th April 1906, the city of San Francisco awakes shaken by a massive earthquake of magnitude 8.6 on the Richter scale and by a huge fire that started afterwards. Even today, it is still classed as one of the worst natural disasters in the USA.

In 1906 San Francisco, you are a property developer for the rapid reconstruction of San Francisco during the five years after the large-scale destruction. Get plots of land and earn money for rubble removal so that you can construct buildings, plan urban development for essential services, and improve the city for its modernization

Continue reading →

Deckers

• Designer: Richard Wilkins
• Publisher: Deep Print / Pegasus
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 60-90 mins
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Deckers, you will hack into a network of five servers, either solo or co-operatively as a team of up to four, winning or losing together. The network is operated by one of the available super-massive computers (SMCs), each with a different level of complexity and its own unique style of defenses that you will need to overcome. Once jacked into the servers, you will assume decker profiles, each with a special ability, moving across the server’s spaces and uploading decker pieces onto the network to expand your control while removing as many of the SMC’s pieces as possible. Each round, you get a new objective you try to fulfill to gain the upper hand. If you manage to complete the final objective, you ultimately claim victory.

Continue reading →

Fearless

• Designer: Friedemann Friese
• Publisher: 2F
• Players: 3-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Fearless, you walk through a gloomy forest and try to stay on the safe path. If you still wander astray, you try to turn back again as close as possible. The closer you are to the safe path, the less fear you will suffer. Not walking at all is no alternative as you’ll remain behind on your own in the scary ruin. If you are the most fearless after several rounds, you will win the game!

Fearless is a simple trick-taking game with four suits and without trump. The card with the highest value in the led suit always wins the trick. The unusual part of the game is the card values as they are not all positive as typical for trick-taking games, but have values from +6 to -6 in each suit. Thus, you collect both negative and positive cards. The kicker: You try to gain a balanced score, collecting both minus and plus points. This is theoretically possible for all players, but “sadly” you play against each other — and the others are always pleased when they can scare you with another handful of points.

Continue reading →