Dale Yu: First Impressions of Coffee Traders

Coffee Traders

  • Designer: Rolf Sagel, Andre Spil
  • Publisher: Capstone Games
  • Players: 2-5
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 2-3 hours
  • Played with review copy provided by Capstone Games.

coffee traders

From the publisher- “In Coffee Traders, set in 1970s Central and South America, Africa, and Asia, the delicious Arabica coffee beans farmers harvest are sold in Antwerp — and all over the world — to coffee roasters large and small. Work with your competitors to develop the regions you see fit for the best coffee beans while keeping a watchful eye on the market. Construct buildings to help your Fair Trade coffee plantations thrive while enhancing your network for trading coffee. Will your plantations fall to ruin, or will you rise to the top and become the world’s greatest coffee trader?”

Continue reading

Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Brandon Kempf – Three Games of Late Spring & Summer

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.

I’m still here, sort of. It has been awhile since I have posted anything over here on the Opinionated Gamers, and I figure it’s about time we change that. With that said, I’m not going to go over everything I’ve played over the past four months, although in reality it isn’t a whole heck of a lot. We’ve definitely found ourselves as a family doing things other than playing games, and with how the Pandemic is moving through Missouri still our game groups have been hit and miss at best. We are slowly getting back into a groove, every other week or so we’ll have a game night and then every other week we’ll have a game day on a Sunday usually dedicated to Gloomhaven or other things like that. So while we are playing games, I don’t really think that we are playing them enough that folks want to read my review of them. Although I do have a couple on the horizon. So, since April, I’ve only sat down and played 37 games a total of 61 plays. The game we played the most, The Initiative, will be the last one I talk about here. We finished the story line, 14 games over three or four months. That’s kind of a big step for us as we never finish these kinds of games, but I’m not sold on it being a good step. Otherwise, things have been kind of just moving forward. Nothing too exciting, nothing too boring gamewise. 

Continue reading
Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Dale Yu: Review of Jungle Race (Android app)

jungle race

Jungle Race was a 2018 boardgame release – in this family game, five racers vie to cross the finish line first. Each player is dealt a hand of cards corresponding to the racers. On a turn, you can play a card for a racer, showing your support of that racer. That car will overtake the next position in line – moving closer to the front. However, if you support the car which is currently in the lead, it will go all the way back to the back of the line!

Continue reading

Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Dale Yu – Review of The Queen of Hansa

The Queen of Hansa

  • Designer: Yutaka Hatakeyama
  • Publisher: Hobby Japan
  • Players: 2-4
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 45-60 minutes
  • Times played: 3, with review copy provided by Hobby Japan

queen of hansa

The Queen of Hansa (and actually, all of Hobby Japan) was a game that I hadn’t initially thought of looking at while in Essen last October. It’s a company that I’m not too familiar with, and none of the titles sounded familiar.  However, after a discussion with one of my good friends, Klemens Franz, I got some insider information that they had games I should really check out.  Sure, Klemens is biased as he is the artist for this game – but it was still a good tip, and I’m glad to have listened to my friend.  I discovered this game as well as finding a new reprint of a game that I adored, Tenka Maidou, which I had not been able to acquire – now called Rumble Nation – but more on that in a different review.

  Continue reading

Posted in Essen 2019, Reviews | Leave a comment

Dale Yu – Review of Gelato Mio

Gelato Mio

  • Designer – Joao Quintela Martins
  • Publisher – artgames
  • Players: 2-6
  • Age: 6+
  • Time 15-20 mins
  • Played 3 times with review copy provided by publisher

gelato mio

Gelato Mio is a nice cardgame that comes in a small deck tuckbox. It is the second game in this format that I have tried from artgames, the other being Vidrado.   Unlike Vidrado, this is more of a traditional card game – where players try to collect cards in order to make ice cream and eventually fulfill order cards for victory points.

The game is made up of 87 cards – split into a number of different decks.  The bulk of the cards are in the ingredient deck; these are shuffled and a 3×3 array of cards is set out on the table.   Continue reading

Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Dale Yu: Review of Crack the Code

Crack the Code

  • Designes: John Shulters and Sarah Graybill
  • Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards
  • Players: 1-4
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Played 5 times with review copy provided by publisher

crack the code

In Crack the Code, your team acts as a group of hackers working to secure your network in a collaborative fashion.  Each player will have a goal card and a tray with colored marbles on it – the goal card obscures the marbles so that the player can’t see the marbles..  Using the available command cards, the players must work together to get the marbles in each tray to match the goal card for that player.  Of course, to make things more complicated, players can only communicate with each other in a limited fashion.

Continue reading

Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment