Now one full day is complete. Played lots of games today, ate some things, and now I am just trying to make a quick recap of what happened today.
As I’m heading into the game room soon, not much time for writing. I think I will just make a note of a few things that struck me from Friday, and then next week, when I am home, I will talk a little bit more in-depth about some of the new games that I encountered this week.
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Well it’s been 3 years since I was at the Gathering of Friends due to work, kids, covid, etc. This year I am blessed to have a long weekend to make the drive to Western New York and hang out with some of my friends.
Not sure how much blogging I’ll do during the con itself, but I will likely make reports in dribs and drabs (whatever I can do from my phone) Continue reading
Every once in a while, we here at the Opinionated Gamers like to compile our thoughts on a gaming topic – not just to fill up space (though that doesn’t hurt) but hopefully to provoke interesting discussion amongst ourselves and the folks who read us on a regular basis.
The question I (Mark) raised with the group is pretty straightforward:
What game(s) do you love now that had a miserable/difficult first play experience… and how did you find your way past the horror show that was the first play?
I’ll start.
Mark Jackson
Ra
I had the privilege of being one of the first groups in the U.S. to get to play Ra, thanks to Jay Tummelson bringing a suitcase full of games he had just signed at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in the spring of 1999 to Gulf Games. The first play of Ra was with 5 players, one of whom had a rather serious case of AP (analysis paralysis) that day and the game lasted almost an hour & a half. (Note: for those who haven’t played this classic, it should be done in 30-45 minutes.) It was, to say the least, excruciating. I gave it a second chance due to finding it on clearance in a going out of business sale of a high-end toy store… and have never regretted it.
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From the multilingual box: Gather your courage, pack your sword, and roll the dice as you journey through the realm in search of treasure and glory. In this roll and write game, you’ll explore deep, dark dungeons filled with treasure – and infested with monsters! Do you have what it takes to be a hero of legend?
I have a lot of games. A lot of games that are on my shelves, or on my table being played, that I have told myself that I want to review at some point. For one reason or another, this doesn’t always happen. My goal here on The Opinionated Gamers is that I want to get about one review out per week, but I’d like to write about more games. So I’m taking a page out of Patrick Brennan’s playbook, and we’re going to start writing about games in threes, in snapshot form. This should be a good way for readers to get to know me and my gaming tastes a bit better, and also another way for me to talk about games that I maybe don’t really want to dedicate two thousand words to. Welcome to Three Games.
Since this will be my third Three Games post in about 5 weeks, I am going to focus on three games this time that were only played once, but made a big impact at the table, be that good, or bad. Thanks to a gathering, which was kind of discussed in a previous Three Games and a lot of online gaming via Board Game Arena, I think I am finally done with Living Forest, at least for the time being, I had quite a few plays for the first time in a long time. Twenty Seven different games hit the table, or computer, for fifty five total plays. With Trek 12 being played eleven times with another play, an Expedition, in progress over on BGA. Our Descent campaign continued on, with me getting even more irritated as I don’t really see what use my character is to the group, but we’re having a really good time playing as a group, it gives us something to focus on every other week or so. Plus I published my first full review of a game in a long while on the site for Ark Nova, a game that I really have taken to and managed to play five times in March. What does April have in store? Probably not as much gaming and a bit more family things and house things, but we’ll hopefully keep the momentum moving forward.
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10 Great Games from the Past 2 Years (Article by Chris Wray)
Gaming largely went on a “pause” for the past two years. There were fewer releases of new games. Conventions were less well-attended — or canceled. Game groups temporarily disbanded. But as the hobby continues its effort to reconnect, we here at the Opinionated Gamers wanted to highlight 10 great games from the past two years. These are games released in 2020, 2021, or 2022 that we’re big fans of.
Today’s article is part of our long-paused “10 Great” series that features 10 great games in a given subcategory. I pick a mechanic, theme, publisher, etc. In this case, I picked a timeline. We here at the Opinionated Gamers then all vote behind the scenes to create a list of 10 great games that meet the criteria.
The Methodology
For purposes of this project, I simply asked everybody to vote for 10 games that released in the past couple of years. That was a loose definition, though, and even some of the winners may have had localized or soft releases before that.
Anybody could add to the list assuming they were going to vote for it. Each member of the OG was offered the chance to vote for up to 10 games, and they could give one game 15 points, one game 14 points, all the way down to giving one 6 points. We all put our votes into a spreadsheet. We then added up the points for each game and picked the top 10.
We had 24 OG-ers vote, and 82 different games received votes.
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