“I Was Victorious” – A Return to Dark Tower Review

Posted on March 11, 2022 by Mark Jackson

“…the fact that my son & I played it five times in the first 2 1/2 days ought to tell you something…”

Just over two years ago, I wrote a lengthy blog post about my history with (but mostly without) the original Dark Tower game… and how the siren call of the Restoration Games reimagining managed to pluck precious board game purchasing dollars from my wallet.

Well, it arrived last Friday around noon – and by late afternoon, my son & I were immersed in a battle to force Ashstrider out of the tower so we could defeat him. (And we did – in words of Monty Python, “There was much rejoicing.”) We took a dinner break… and then we took on Isa the Exile – successfully, I might add.

Saturday morning we added the Alliances expansion… and both the Lingering Rot (morning) and Gravemaw (afternoon) roundly defeated us. Sunday afternoon found us fighting Utuk-Ku the Ice Herald… and finally being successful while playing with the expansion.

To flesh out the header at the top of the page – when your 16 year old son who prefers shorter games (Unmatched, Exceed, Jump Drive, etc.) is willing to play a 90-120 minute game FIVE TIMES in just over 48 hours, you know it’s something special. It’s just as true when I’m personally willing to play the same 90-120 minute game five times in a weekend.

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Talia Rosen: The Game That Launched 1,000 Emails

Posted on March 9, 2022 by Talia Rosen

Living Forest is not a game that I expected to be writing about.  It’s a deck-building game, and I hate those, right?  I thought I did.  I was sure I did.  Of course I devoured Dominion when it came out in 2008 with over 100 plays in the months that followed.  But I tired of it, and then its immediate progeny were exceedingly dull and derivative.  Ascension, pass.  Thunderstone, hard pass.  Orleans, no thanks.  A Few Acres of Snow, ha!  Mage Knight, my time is finite.  Penny Arcade: The Game, derivation piled on derivation.  Nightfall, make it stop!  After a few years, I decided to just write-off all deck-building games as a lost cause.

When the couple dozen Opinionated Gamer contributors are planning what to write about, we send around a few emails to discuss the latest games and, of course, our opinions.  Most games don’t generate more than a handful of emails.  There are just too many games and too little time.  Living Forest is not most games.  For some strange reason, discussion of Aske Christiansen’s debut game generated piles of emails, mountains of emails, heaps and heaps of emails.

Occasionally, I turn those email threads into an OG Roundtable, like the one about traditional card games or the one about Legends of Andor.  Not this time.  It all started with a message declaring that the game “surprisingly did not suck.”  An auspicious start if ever there was one.  Paris and Helen had set sail for Troy, and the die had been cast (to mix my Mediterranean metaphors).

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Dale Yu: Review of Living Forest

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Dale Yu

Living Forest

  • Designer: Aske Christiansen
  • Publisher: Ludonaute
  • Players: 2-4
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 40 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher via Asmodee NA

living forest

In Living Forest, players play as one of the four Spirits of Nature, trying to become the Grand Protector of the Forest. The Four Spirits of Nature – Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn – have been called to rescue the Sacred Tree of the Forest facing the devastating flames of Onibi…

Each player gets their own Forest board, a grid of 5×3 spaces, with a single starting Protective tree on it.  The players also get a starting deck of 14 Guardian Animal cards.  These cards have elements found on the left hand side of the card which will be used to perform the actions in the game.  This small deck is shuffled and placed facedown next to your Forest board.  The remainder of the cards are split into three levels, each set is shuffled, and a tableau of 4 cards of each level is made.  There is also a circular spirit board on which each player has a single pawn representing themselves. A fire token starts the game in the center of the spirit board.

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Brandon Kempf – Three Games of the Past 6 Months

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Brandon Kempf

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.

It has been awhile, and I apologize. Like a lot of folks the malaise of the last two years had finally taken full hold and made me just kind of give up on one of my favorite things, talking about board games. I think the last time I wrote anything for the OG was in September of last year after The Gathering of Friends seemed to help renew a bit of that desire, but it was short lived and here we are, March of 2022 and I am finally getting back around to it. I hopped back into weekly posting in one of my favorite long running Geeklists on Board Game Geek a couple months back and it has been refreshing to have something to do on Monday mornings for a half hour or so. In the meantime, Dale has continued to fill this website with game after game and I am honestly utterly confused at how he continued to do it amidst all of this (motioning arms to everything). So let’s talk about three games that I’ve been playing since we last spoke in September. 

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Dale Yu – Review of Bad Company

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Dale Yu

Bad Company

  • Designers: Kristian A. Østby, Kenneth Minde, Eilif Svensson
  • Publisher: Aporta Games
  • Players: 1-6
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 30-45 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by Aporta Games

bad company

As we continue our review of Norwegian games, we look at Bad Company, a game where players build their own gang and customize it to suit their plans. The idea is to gather resources to complete heists and money to recruit new gang members. And make sure you escape the police! 

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Dale Yu: Review of Riverside

Posted on March 1, 2022 by Dale Yu

Riverside

  • Designers: Asmund and Eilif Svensson
  • Publisher: Chilifox
  • Players: 1-6
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 20-30 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by the publisher

Riverside

The story (per the rules):  Far to the north, in a remote winter land, rivers are frozen most of the year. When the villages along the riverside eventually are accessible, a small river cruise company offers exotic tours like polar bear safaris, reindeer trips, ice fishing, and more. Lucky tourists may even get a chance to see the northern lights. You work as a tour guide trying to attract tourists to your guide boats for spectacular excursions.

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Posted in Essen 2021, Reviews | 2 Comments