Echoes: the Cocktail

• Designers: Matthew Dunstan, Dave Neale
• Publisher: Ravensburger
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 14+
• TIme: 1 hour
• Times played: 1 with review copy provided by Ravensburger NA

Echoes is a new franchise of puzzle games by Ravensburger.  They remind me a lot of the Adventure game series from Kosmos (also designed by Matthew Dunstan).  For both, I am not sure if I classify them as games, they feel more like interactive fiction to me – but in the end, they are games on BGG, and I enjoy both of them regardless of which classification box they get smushed into….

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Super Mega Lucky Box

• Designer: Phil Walker Harding
• Publisher: Gamewright
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Times played: 6 with review copy provided by publisher

Super Mega Lucky Box (SMLB) feels like it’s the tenth new Phil Walker-Harding game I’ve played this summer.  (It’s not… it just feels that way!)  And, amazingly, each of those PWH games has been different in style/genre.    SMLB is PWH’s take on the R+W field – combining aspects that will feel familiar from other games to create a fresh twist for this game.

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Clever Cubed

• Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
• Publisher: Stronghold Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Times played: >12, with prototype from designer, review copy from Stronghold, online versions
• (https://www.schmidtspiele.de/static/onlinespiele/CleverHochDrei/index.html)

Clever Cubed is the third installment in the Ganz schön clever universe.  In many ways, it feels the same, as the active player rolls 6 dice, isolates some, and then everyone makes marks on their scoring sheet – but there are different mini-games in play to still make this feel different from its two predecessors.

If you’ve played either of the other two Clever games (Ganz Schon Clever or Twice as Clever) before, you know most of the rules. If not, read on…

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Juicy Fruits

• Designer: Christian Stohr
• Publisher: Capstone Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20-40 minutes
• Played 5 times with review copy provided by publisher

Capstone Games is a label that I generally associate with longer complex games – but they have started a new Family line of games to target this more mainstream group.  One of the releases from 2021 is Juicy Fruits, a game designed by half of the team that won the 2020 Spiel des Jahres for Pictures.   

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Adventure Games: The Grand Hotel Abaddon

• Designers: Phil Walker-Harding, Matthew Dunstan, Ute Wielandt
• Publisher: KOSMOS
• Players: 1-4 (I played solo)
• Ages: 12+
• Time: 2-3 hours
• Played with review copy provided by Thames&Kosmos

The Adventure Games system was launched in 2019 – a different riff on the “Escape room” genre which continues to grow in size and variety. In this series of games, players work together to get through a story. Unlike many of the other games (including the EXIT series also by Kosmos), there is no time constraint in the Adventure Games line. Instead, players are encouraged to explore their surroundings and watch/listen to the story unfold. 

(THERE ARE SOME SUPER-MILD SPOILERS IN THE IMAGES. There is warning, but if you don’t want to see them at all, turn off the images in your browser, re-load this page, and read this without the pictures. I do not think seeing any of the pictures will affect your play of the game at all, but I think I should be 100% clear that there are some pics of actual game components below)

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Mobile Escapes

https://www.mobileescapes.ca/

If you are a regular here to the blog, you’ll know that we enjoy escape rooms and escape room/puzzle games (reviews here – https://opinionatedgamers.com/?s=escape+room)

We were recently contacted by a company, Mobile Escapes, from Canada – they are a company which did in-person escape rooms in the before times, but like many other companies, they have pivoted to online adventures which allow people to have fun at home and remain socially distant.  I’d like to take a chance to write about the experience, in a spoiler-free fashion.

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