Belladone Bluff

• Designers: Konstantinos Karagiannis
• Publisher: Lubee Edition
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

“Belladonna: plant in the Solanaceae family. Highly toxic, it can cause death. When properly dosed, its active substance is still used in modern medicine. To win a medical preparation, you need to add the seventh ingredient. But is it a cure with a positive score or a poison with a negative score? Face-up or face-down cards, calculation, memory and bluffing will enable you to win the game with more points than your opponent(s).”

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Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West

• Designers: Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock, Alan R. Moon
• Publisher: Days of Wonder
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20-90 minutes (per the box)
• Played with review copy provided by Days of Wonder
• Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3MmRYiQ

Well, it’s really hard to review a legacy game – well, difficult if you want to do it and not give away any spoilers about the campaign.  As you likely know, the joy in a legacy game are the surprising twists and turns that you discover as the story unfolds.  If you read a review that tells you what happens, there might not be any reason to play the game!  For this game, we’ll probably write a few things about it.  For this initial piece, I will talk about only the first game (and still leave out any possible spoilers that might come out at the end of the first game).  

The goal here is to help you see what the first game is like, and this might help you make a decision if you want to invest in the game and get involved in a multi-game campaign.  Just about all of the information here comes from the rulebook – and this can be downloaded online, so no secrets there…  And, since the game comes out today – it seems like the perfect time to talk about the game!

So, the story from the publisher:

In Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West, players embark on twelve journeys across North America as 19th century pioneers. The campaign begins on the East Coast, with players working their way to the West from one adventure to the next, meeting challenges along the way. As in Ticket to Ride, completing your tickets will remain your primary goal, but you will need to develop other skills if you hope to overcome the unexpected events and your resourceful rivals. Game after game, route after route, you will continuously fill your vault with earnings. As the story progresses, you will open frontier boxes that unlock new rules, content, and many more surprises.

In the Legacy style, Legends of the West is a unique experience molded by player choices. Each player has their own role to play, allowing them to change the way the story unfolds around them. Combined with evolving mechanisms that change as the game progresses, players will have a new experience every time they gather around the board. At the end of the twelve games in this legacy campaign, you will have transformed your game into a unique copy that you can continue playing for a lifetime.

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Elios

• Designer: Philippe Proux
• Publisher: Helvetiq
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 7+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Played with copy provided by publisher

Elios is an abstract wooden game where the goal of the game is to be the first player to get rid of all your sticks.  To start the game, a sun made up of 2 discs stacked on each other is placed in the center of the table. One beam of each of the 8 colors is placed around the sun in random arrangement.

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Llamas & Alpacas

• Designer: Rita Modl
• Publisher: Trefl
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to the world of breeding even-toed ungulates! And not just any even-toed ungulates, but very friendly alpacas and their slightly less friendly llama cousins! (Seriously, we don’t recommend getting bitten by a llama!) You have your own pasture, and you need to place your herds on it to score as many points as possible. Animals are happiest with similar animals, so pay attention to common traits in your herds that will help you overtake the other players in a fun gallop to victory.

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