The Chameleon

• Designer: Rikki Tahta
• Publisher: Big Potato Games
• Players: 3-8
• Ages: 14+
• Time: 10-15 minutes
• Times played: 4 with review copy provided by Big Potato Games

I first ran across this game at Essen a few years ago – at that time, it was called Gooseberry.  It was from a small company, La Mame Games which was better known for its signature game, Coup (which, for the record, is completely not for me…).  The initial release of the game was kind of quiet, and I got in one sample game at the stand.  It was hard to hear in the great hall, and I was playing with folks from all over the place, so language was a bit of an issue.   The game seemed ok, but it was very much like Spyfall which I had also recently acquired at the time.  For a bunch of reasons, Gooseberry never made it into the IKEA bag of holding that year. Continue reading →

Pelta Peeps

• Designers: Thomas Kite and Samuel Kite
• Publisher: Pelta Games
• Players: 2 to 6
• Ages: “all” says the box; I’d say 10+
• Time: 10-90 minutes
• Times played: 6, with review copy provided by Pelta Games

Pelta Peeps is the first game from a small company called Pelta Games.  It is a family run board game company founded in 2016 by Thomas Kite and Robin-Luft Kite. With backgrounds in gaming, Fine Arts, and years of experience working in IT, their mission is to explore everything gaming can mean. The company motto is “Play is Art & Art is Play”.

From their FAQ: “We are a small indie company that’s a family affair (2 generations). Our games are designed and made to order by us in Panama City, Florida. We don’t use offshoring because of the exploitation that’s involved as well as associated wasteful transportation impact on the environment.

When we’re in control of how our games are made, we do our best to make that process as environmentally friendly as possible. The pieces of our 1st game are UV printed, laser cut acrylic. This means very low power consumption and VOC free inks. And this results in a durable game that’ll last a very long time vs. most other materials. Our games are made to be enjoyed for years – even generations to come.” Continue reading →

Fantasy Realms

• Designer: Bruce Glassco
• Publisher: WizKids
• Players: 3-6
• Ages: 14+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Times played: 5, with review copy provided by WizKids

In Fantasy Realms, each player is the ruler of a far-away kingdom, trying to make the best and strongest kingdom possible – being represented by a hand of seven cards.  Each of these cards has a base strength, a suit and some form of bonus and/or penalty value.  In this game, you will draft from a deck comprised of only 53 different cards to develop your kingdom.

Well, I don’t think I’ve ever done this – but I’ll copy over the text of the game play in the rules VERBATIM… Continue reading →

The results of the Deutscher Spielepreis award were announced a couple of days ago.  This is the German game award which focuses more on heavier games than the SdJ does.  Terraforming Mars, designed by Jacob Fryxelius and published by FryxGames, emerged as the winner, beating out Alexander Pfister’s Great Western Trail.  Here are the results of the top games:

1. Terraforming Mars
2. Great Western Trail
3. A Feast for Odin
4. Scythe
5. First Class
6. Kingdomino
7. Raiders of the North Sea
8. Fabled Fruit
9. Captain Sonar
10. Magic Maze
11. The Quest for El Dorado

Kingdomino and Raiders of the North Sea tied for sixth place.  I guess the DSP committee believes in friendly ties, because they listed the next four games as finishing from 7th to 10th!  I’ve restored the rankings to the more accurate ones, but it’s good to know that El Dorado finished just out of the top 10.

There seems to be a growing consensus that TM and GWT were the two leading strategy games from last year.  They finished 1-2 in the Meeples Choice Awards (TM won that battle as well, although both won awards, along with Yokohama) and they figure to battle it out for the IGA’s which will be announced sometime in October.  Scythe, which won the Golden Geeks and the Dice Tower Awards earlier in the year, seems to be fading a bit in gamers’ estimations.

Congratulations to Jacob Fryxelius and the rest of the FryxGames team for this significant honor!

Seikatsu

• Designer: Matt Loomis and Isaac Shalev
• Publisher: IDW Games
• Players: 1-4
• Ages: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Times played – 3 with preview copy provided by IDW

Seikatsu is a word that means “Life” in Japanese. In this game, players contribute to the development of a garden which is known for both its flowers and its birds. Each player has a pagoda from which they view the garden, and the player who has the most breathtaking view of the garden will win this game.

The garden is a hex shaped affair with pagodas on three vertexes. The central space of the garden is filled with a koi pond – leaving 32 spaces in the garden. Conveniently, there are 32 garden tiles in a bag to be played – 28 have a bird in the center and a flower type around the outside. The game begins with a few tiles being randomly seeded onto the board adjacent to the central koi pond. There are also 4 koi pond tiles which are added to the bag after setup.  Each player then draws two tiles from the bag as their starting hand. Continue reading →

Deckscape: Fate of London (spoiler free review)

• Designers: Martino Chiacchiera and Silvano Sorrentino
• Players: 1-6
• Ages: 12+
• Time: 45-90 minutes
• Times played: 1, with review copy provided by dv Giochi

The puzzle game genre has been rapidly growing over the last few years – there have been many entries in this field over that time period.  Likewise, we’ve done our best here to seek out as many of them as we can to try.  Many of the initial forays into the puzzle area have been big-box affairs, some with electronic solving devices – allowing for multiple expansions that use the same hardware.  The catch with most of these games are that they can really only be played once – because once you know the solution to the puzzle, you can’t really experience the solving of the same puzzle again…

The new movement in the genre looks to be in making the puzzle solving experiences more portable. There are a number of different series of games coming out that attempt to give you the same experience in a single deck of cards.  Deckscape from dv Giochi is one of them – we reviewed the first entry in this series back in April: https://opinionatedgamers.com/2017/04/22/dale-yu-review-of-deckscape-test-time-spoiler-free/  This review will also be spoiler-free.  All pictures here are taken from the dv giochi website, so everything you see here is what they have allowed you to see… Continue reading →