Dale Yu – Review of Stich Rallye

Posted on November 2, 2021 by Dale Yu

Stich Rallye

  • Designer: H. J. Kook
  • Publisher: Amigo Games
  • Players: 3-5
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 20-30 minutes
  • Played with new version provided by AMIGO

stich rallye

This year at SPIEL 2021, Amigo is bringing a interesting Korean Racing game to the market. Originally sold as Spring Rally (back in 2018) – players race their spring driven cars around the track – the board is double sided and this allows you to race on two different circuits. Each player gets a contraption made up of two discs that represents the spring in your race car.   There is a deck of cards, made up of three suits from 1-15, which can be modified for player count.  The appointed cards are shuffled and each player is dealt a hand of five cards for the first round.  The later rounds are longer with 7 cards being dealt in the second round and 9 cards being dealt in the third and final round.  The game is won by the first player to complete two circuits of the track.

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Matt Carlson: The Dice of Gen Con

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Matt J Carlson

As I mentioned previously, for many years Gen Con was a mecca for role-playing aficionados. As with any pastime, players grow fond of their tools and toys. Role-playing is no different and one can look no further than a player’s dice to get a sense of a gamer’s personal style. The field of dice manufacturers has exploded of late, fueled by every gamer’s credo of “hey, I could always use more dice.” It used to be enough to provide interesting colors – perhaps going so crazy as to have a swirl of two colors AT THE SAME TIME! Simply Incredible. Now, coloration is no longer enough. Gamers can get dice made out of metal, semiprecious (even precious) stones, and wood. There are extra large and small varieties and a wealth of options for the symbols appearing on the faces. Since the dealer hall is just chock full of vendors, I thought it might be fun to take you, the reader, on a trip through the dealer dice hall. Note, that many, if not most, of the dice vendors have multiple stalls throughout the hall. Letting no temporary dice-buying urge to go unchecked.

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Matt Carlson: Gen Con 2021 – RPGs

Posted on October 30, 2021 by Matt J Carlson
An example animated map by Arkenforge.

Gen Con started out in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin a little over 50 years ago. It focused on wargames until the mid 70’s when the first tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons, came onto the scene, quickly overtaking prominence at the convention. The role-playing side of things remains strong, even at this year’s reduced level of activity. While most of the gaming takes place outside the exhibit hall, there were still plenty of RPG-oriented booths to peruse. Here’s a sample of what I found… Boilerplate excuses for all errors contained within still apply.

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Dale Yu – Review of the Holiday Hijinks Series  (Spoiler Free)

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Dale Yu

The Independence Incident / The Kringle Caper / The Pumpkin Problem

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The Holiday Hijinks series are a set of three (so far) pocket sized escape room/puzzles.  I first encountered The Indepence Incident after a friend received it as a gift from the Gathering of Friends.  We brought it to the table as an opener for game night, and we were quite impressed with the challenges provided by this small packet of 18 cards.  The idea here is an “Escape room” of sorts- with the goal being to get though the deck to the last card.

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2020 Game Awards Summary

Posted on October 28, 2021 by huzonfirst

With the announcement yesterday of the Meeples Choice Awards results, the last of the 2020 primary and secondary Game of the Year awards have now been set. So this seems like a good time to summarize which titles have been honored by the various awards over the course of the year.

  • SdJ Family:
    • Spiel des Jahres – MicroMacro: Crime City
    • Kennerspiel – Paleo
    • Kinderspiel – Dragomino
  • DSP – Lost Ruins of Arnak
  • IGA Family:
    • Multiplayer – Lost Ruins of Arnak
    • Two Player – My City
    • Solo – Under Falling Skies
  • a la carte (best card game) – Fantasy Realms
  • Golden Geek Family:
    • Light Game – MicroMacro: Crime City
    • Medium Game – Lost Ruins of Arnak
    • Heavy Game – Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
  • Dice Tower – The Crew
  • Meeples Choice Awards:
    • Beyond the Sun
    • Lost Ruins of Arnak
    • Dune: Imperium

Clearly, the most honored game of the year was Lost Ruins of Arnak. It took two major awards (the DSP and IGA), got an SdJ nomination, and also won the Golden Geek and MCA awards. In addition, it won the Dice Tower Best Strategy game category, giving it very close to a clean sweep. Congratulations to designers Michaela Stachova and Michal Stach, as well as the entire creative team of publisher CGE, for coming up with a game that delighted so many of us.

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Fantasy Realms Wins 2020 a la carte Award

Posted on October 28, 2021 by huzonfirst

Every year, Fairplay magazine conducts the a la carte award, in which their readers choose their favorite card game of the year.  This is a very good award, which consistently rewards excellent games.  The results for 2020 were recently announced and the winner is Fantasy Realms.  Even though this game was originally released by WizKids in 2017 in the English speaking world, this isn’t really a surprising result.  Strohmann Games released the game in Germany last October, and it’s been a big success since then.  It was a finalist for the Kennerspiel award and finished in the top 10 for the DSP award, so it was clearly one of the leading card games of the year.

The a la carte winner from 2019 was The Crew and the game’s sequel, The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, finished second this year.  So Thomas Sing and Kosmos almost had back to back titles with this series.

Here are the top ten finishers for the a la carte, together with the game’s designers.  More so than usual, there are a number of games that were released earlier than 2020 in the English speaking world that are honored this year for their German editions.  This is probably a trend that we’ll continue to see in future years.

  1. Fantasy Realms (Bruce Glassco)
  2. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (Thomas Sing)
  3. Point Salad (Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich)
  4. The 7th Continent (Ludovic Roudy, Bruno Sautter)
  5. Riftforce (Carlo Bortolini)
  6. Wild Space (Joachim Thome)
  7. The Fox in the Forest (Joshua Buergel)
  8. Kompromat (Rob Fisher, Adam Porter)
  9. Spirits of the Wild (Nick Hayes)
  10. Spukstaben (Moritz Dressler)
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