Dale Yu: Review of Plague Inc

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Dale Yu

Plague Inc

  • Designer: James Vaughan
  • Publisher: Ndemic Creations
  • Players: 1-4
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 60 minutes
  • Times played: 3 with review copy provided by Asmodee NA

plague inc

Plague Inc is a game that has been around for a few years now, but is getting a re-release this summer.  Given the global pandemic, infectious things are all the rage, and I suppose that people felt it was time to get this back on the market.  Given the resurgence of Pandemic and the rest of its game family, there is definitely a desire to play games with the theme…  However, there is a twist here because in this game, you’re not trying to save the world, but rather infect it all!  If the title of the boardgame sounds familiar, it may be because you once played (and maybe still do) the game on your phone!  Each player is a deadly disease and they must battle against each other to spread their plagues, develop new symptoms and ultimately wipe out humanity.

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Dale Yu: First Impression of Vampire The Masquerade: Rivals

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Dale Yu

Vampire The Masquerade: Rivals

  • Designer: Matt Hyra
  • Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
  • Players: 2-4
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: about an hour
  • Review copy provided by publisher

vampire rivals

Vampire: The Masquerade is the franchise that has seemingly been everywhere in the past year or two.  In this game, each player controls a group of vampires trying to dominate San Francisco.  You can win by either furthering your own Agenda or by knocking out your Rival.

The game comes with 4 pre-sealed basic decks – one for each clan: Burjah, Toreador, Venture, Malkavian.  When you start out, you simply unwrap a deck and play it.  You will split it up into a small faction deck, a haven card, an agenda card and a 40 card Library.  Once you are familiar with the game, you can later modify your decks with extra cards included in the box.   Each player gets 20 Prestige markers at the start To start a game, you take the City Deck, remove 4 Event cards from it at random and then shuffle the rest together.    Look through your faction deck and choose the vampire with the highest Blood Potency value in the upper left. Place that card on the table and mark it with a “Leader” token.  Finally, from your supply of Prestige, add markers to your Leader equal to your blood potency rating; flip the counters over so they are on the Blood side.   

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The Opinionated Gamers (Try To) Predict the Spiel Des Jahres and Kennerspiel Des Jahres – 2021 Edition Final Guesses

Posted on July 17, 2021 by Chris Wray

For the past few years, our group of gamers has taken their best guess at trying to read the minds of the Spiel des Jahres jury members.  The nominations for the Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres were announced back in May, and we made our predictions shortly beforehand. The winners will be announced on Monday, and you can usually watch the ceremony over on BGG or other places.  

As has become our habit, we’ve done our predictions in two parts.  This is the second of those parts, where once the lists are out, we do a second round of voting, limited only to the actual nominees.  (In the first round, we tried to guess the nominees.)

This year, we used a similar system to what we’ve used the past four years.  Each OG writer was invited to rank all three games in each category, with their top pick (what they see as most likely) getting 3 points, second pick getting 2, and final pick getting 1.  Vote totals are shown below.    

If you’d like to see the official information on and criteria for the award, please check out the Jury’s website.

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They Say It’s Your Birthday! – A Plethora of Gaming Impressions

Posted on July 16, 2021 by Mark Jackson

Well… between a great sale at Miniature Market in mid-June, Father’s Day, my birthday, and a Kickstarter finally delivering, my already overly-large game collection became – ahem – larger. 

More importantly, my birthday “party” was to road trip to West Virginia with my older son, Braeden, and spend a long weekend with my good friend (and fellow OG writer) Ted Cheatham playing board games and eating Jane Cheatham’s delicious cooking. 

What follows is my quickie recap of the games we played… some old, some brand new – but all enjoyable due to the company! In addition, I’ll add some notes about additional plays of other games played in the week or so since the trek to Charleston.

And, because I understand some of you just won’t every word I’ve written, I’ll add the box cover picture of my favorite new-to-me game from each day.

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Dale Yu – Review of World Changers

Posted on July 15, 2021 by Dale Yu

World Changers

  • Designer: THEKI
  • Publisher: Korea Board Games / Cheeky Parrot
  • Players: 1-4
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 10 – 15 minutes
  • Played 4 times with review copy provided by Korea Board Games

world changers

World Changes has been on my radar for nearly a year now.  Korea Board Games has had plenty of teasers of the art in their newsletters for quite some time now.  In this quick playing game, players are the captain of an interstellar spaceship (because Earth is no longer inhabitable), and they are trying to assemble a crew of historical figures to allow humanity to best thrive on their new home….

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Dale Yu: First Impressions of Subastral

Posted on July 14, 2021 by Dale Yu

Subastral

  • Designers: Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback
  • Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
  • Players: 3-5
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 20-30 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by Renegade Game Studios

subastral

Subastral is a strategic card game brought to you by the same pair who earlier designed Stellar.  In this game, players try to take notes on the eight different biomes of the planet – hoping to be rewarded for the breadth of their research as well as for the in-depth view of two in particular.  Like Stellar, players will be collecting cards and playing them in front of them.  While some of the mechanics are familiar, this is a game that definitely stands on its own.

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