Designers: Jakub Caban, Matt Dembek, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Players: 1-4
Ages: 12+
Time: 450 minutes on box (my game lasted 5hr 15min)
Times played: 1, with review copy provided by Board&Dice
*** The buik of this review is spoiler free. I will mention at the top that the pictures I used here were taken within the first 5 minutes of me playing the game – yes, there is some actual content in those pictures, but they are literally the first things you’ll see – so I really don’t think there is much spoilage going on. If you were to play the game, you’d see all this stuff immediately anyways. ***
The Escape Tales line of games (now three total) are a bit different from other “escape room games” – these games are more story driven, and then claim to offer up much more than the 60-90 minutes of gameplay as is generally standard for the genre. The publisher also claims that there is a higher replay value to the game as “you won’t gain access to every puzzle and location in a single playthrough of the game. Everything you do will impact the end result – which means the game can be played more than once”.
As with many other escape room games, any review of the game needs to avoid spoilers – and as such, I will not really give any specifics of the things that I saw in my playthrough of the game. The game is not timed – so this is not a race – and yes, there is a lot of story here. My play took about 5 hours in a solo adventure on a rainy and cold February evening.. There are multiple locations in the game, and you theoretically have the ability to search “anywhere”. In actuality, each location is split up into twelve different zones, and each of those twelve zones can be explored by spending an action marker there.
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.
Traditionally for me, February has always been an off month. A month where we just don’t play too many games. This year it was especially so. We had our furnace expire during the coldest stretch of winter and we have been getting our house ready for a new roof and a lot of other work. Which mostly meant, figuring out finances and fighting with insurance companies, which didn’t leave us with a lot of energy to play many board games. In February we played ten different games for a total of twelve plays. Yup, you read that correctly, twelve total plays. Hey, only one of those was online though, so the table percentage is going up. But still, I don’t feel like much of a game reviewer if we aren’t playing many games so it was kind of a depressing month that bled into March, which has been looking even bleaker. We have some stuff coming, it’s just a struggle to find people to play with at the moment, hopefully that changes as folks become more willing to get out and about as more folks get vaccinated. We did play some games though, and here are three of them in brief.
Times played: 1, with preview copy provided by Lookout Games / Asmodee NA
So when I first heart about this book, I wasn’t even sure if it woudl make it into the BGG database. It is an adventure book, and by the definitions of BGG, it might not even qualify as a game there. I don’t care so much for the definitions, and I had a great time working my way through the book, and now that I have the full published version, I wanted to update my review with new pictures and thoughts on the final production.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking – a convention report in the midst of a pandemic? Well, this was a very exclusive con. In order to attend you had to live in my house, and total attendance was capped at two. Back in December, we were talking about the fact that we both had some vacation days to use, thanks to not travelling or going to our usual game cons throughout last year and I jokingly said – too bad we can’t have a 2 person game con here. We laughed, but then thought “wait – why can’t we have a 2 person game con here?”, so we blocked off three days in our calendar and Nose Con was born. It was held in the currently very-exclusive den of the Noseworthy residence and for three days we ignored almost everything else to just play some games.
DAY 1
Day 1 of Nose Con was deemed Long Games Day, although really it should be Long Game Day, because we decided to play all four eras of The Colonists, and since it had been a while there was some rules review and a lot of thinking time.. You can read Dale’s full review of the game from back in 2017 here. You are a mayor of a town, and your goal is to fully house, clothe, educate and entertain your citizens. It’s a really interesting, well-designed game; there are a lot of different ways to achieve victory, and each era builds up really well from the previous era. That said, it is also possible to play fewer eras for a shorter game and still have a very enjoyable experience.
The downside? Well, there is a LOT to think about and look at. The text and icons on the buildings are small and can be hard to see as the board continues to grow. You have a lot to think about on your turn, and a lot of planning that needs to happen. There is no interim scoring, so there’s no automatic gauge to let you know how you are doing, so analysis paralysis can be a big problem. The game claims to take 20 minutes per player per era, which means our game should have been 160 minutes but it took closer to 7 hours. When we were playing it more regularly it tended to be closer to 4. So, it took longer than expected, but since our whole day was dedicated to gaming, it didn’t matter!
After The Colonists was finished and we’d had dinner we decided to spend the evening playing shorter, lighter games.
First up we played two games of Rajas: The Dice Charmers. It doesn’t look like we reviewed this one yet but we should, because it’s a great game. It takes most of the elements of Rajas of the Ganges and turns it into a roll-and-write. It works really well as a 2 player game. There are 6 dice in 3 categories – goods, palace actions and roads. The active player rolls the dice, chooses one and puts the matching die to the side. The other players all then choose a die, marking off the appropriate area on their sheet and taking any bonuses they trigger. It’s a tight game and while you are subject to the luck of the draw as to what dice are available you need to plan and try to chain your bonuses together for maximum effect.
Our final game of the night was Second Chance. This is a fun little flip-and-write by Uwe Rosenberg. You flip over two cards with different shapes on them (think Tetris); all players simultaneously choose one of the shapes and draw it onto their grid. If you cannot fit one of the shapes on your board you get the chance to flip one additional card; if you can draw that shape play continues as normal. If you cannot, the other player(s) continue until they face the same situation. The player with the fewest empty spaces wins. I bought this to round out a game order, figuring it would be good to play with non-gamers, but we’ve actually played it several times because it’s a great closer for those times that you want one more game but don’t have a lot of time or a lot of brain power.
DAY 2
Day 2 of Nose Con had no particular agenda, other than to break out a copy of a new game, Monasterium, that had just arrived. You can read my full review of the game here, but it is a fun resource management game. We liked it enough to immediately play it a second time; that’s something I rarely get to do, but that I find helpful because it really helps solidify the rules as well as allow you to explore a new strategy now that you know that you know what you are doing.
After 2 games of Monasterium we decided to break out Crystal Palace. This game had been on my to-try list since it came out, and I was all set to learn it at a con last spring, which of course did not work out. So, when I was looking for an anniversary game for my husband last fall (15th anniversary is crystal) I picked this one up. I love a good worker placement game and this one does not disappoint. I like the balance of luck with the dice and strategy of planning where to place them and when as well as how to manage the costs. It also works quite well with 2; the designer has included adaptations for different player counts.
Up next was Big Easy Busking, a game I picked up solely based on its theme of music in New Orleans. One of the many things I love about New Orleans is the number of musicians busking all around the city; no matter where you are you can hear music. I had low expectations for this one after reading the rules, but it turns out to be pretty fun. It’s a light resource management/area control game with cards that deserves a more detailed review at some point.
It was just before dinner at this point, so we finished up with 2 games of Mistkafer.Mistkafer is not a game I would have thought I would like at first glance, but I am glad I gave it a try. The only reason I did is because on our second day at Essen in 2017, we were wandering around with no real agenda, having failed to get into a demo of anything we wanted to try and feeling overwhelmed by the crowds, when we were beckoned over by a Schmidt rep who offered to teach us, so we said sure. We enjoyed it, immediately played a second game with someone who had come up during our first game and then bought a copy. It’s a fun press-your-luck game; it has a small element of hosing the other players, but it’s not enough to make the game feel mean or unfair. This is another game that we can get our non-gamer friends and family to play.
Post-dinner we decided to keep the light games going. Up first was Schwupps, another closer/filler game that we had picked up in Essen, because I am a sucker for an Amigo card game. Here you have a hand of numbered and colored cards that you are trying to get rid of by playing as many as possible to the four piles in the middle of the table. Those four piles all have modifiers – +1, -1, same color, same number etc. You play as many as you can from your hand, draw back up to 4 and continue until all your cards are gone. If you can’t play any you are forced to draw a card, which you can then play if possible, as well as switch out one of the modifiers. There are also Schwupps cards that allow you to switch out a modifier, but require your opponent to draw a card. This is a pretty light game, but it’s fun, easy to teach and works well with any number of players.
Next up was Qwixx gemixxt. Qwixx is one of our go to pub games, since it is very portable and easy to play, so I had picked up this new expansion, which adds two new sheets. One pad has the colors split across the rows of numbers while the other sheet has the numbers in non-numerical order. It added a fun little twist, but it isn’t necessary for this beer and pretzels type game to be fun.
We ended with Noch Mal (aka Encore), a game that I have been playing on my iPad for quite some time, but didn’t own until recently. It’s a roll and write. Both players have a copy of the same sheet. The active player rolls the dice, half of which have colors and half of which have numbers. The active player chooses a color and a number and fills in those spots on their sheet, and the other players choose from the leftover dice. You score points for completing columns and for completing all of one color. Simple yet strangely addicting, especially as an app.
DAY 3
Day 3 of Nose Con was the last day, since we couldn’t ignore our responsibilities for much longer. We started it off with a game that has been sitting unopened and unplayed on our shelf for several months – Kraftwagen. Your goal is to build the best car company in Germany by developing cars, testing them and then selling them to the general public. You have limited actions in which to do this, and every turn I felt completely stressed out trying to do everything I needed to do. It also felt very dry to me, and I just couldn’t get into it. I have several friends who really like the game, though, so I need to give it another try.
We have a tradition with a friend that we always play an Uwe Rosenberg game at every con we go to, so we had to make sure we got a Rosenberg game. We broke out Fields of Arle. This does not see as much play as I would like due to its sheer size versus the size of our current-but-soon-to-be-replaced gaming table. It is a terrific two player game (or 3 player game with the Tea and Trade expansion) with a lot of depth. Sure, it is another game about farming, but it has a very different feel from Agricola, It can be overwhelming at the start to narrow down what you want to do since there are so many options, and you really need to focus, but you are rewarded for putting the time in to learn it. Every game is different, since there are so many different strategies to pursue. The setup seems to the reason this doesn’t hit the table more, so I just bought an organizer to both help with that and fit the expansion in the original box.
We followed up with another game of Monasterium and then, due to the hour and our brain fatigue in learning new rules, decided we needed something lighter. We settled on Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters. When we opened the box we realized we had never played with the expansion that makes it more strategic, so we decided to include it. I am sad to report that, despite our best efforts, the ghosts were victorious. I did like the expansion though and will probably default to that in the future; it added a little more strategy and made it a little harder, at least with 2 players.
So, was Nose Con a success? I think so. It’s certainly not going to replace cons with more than 2 people, since part of the fun of a con is seeing so many of our friends. We do play games regularly, but usually not for extended stretches of time as other responsibilities interfere, so it was nice to have that feeling of an entire day of games ahead of you. It was a nice diversion to distract us from the quarantine, and it gave us something to look forward to. Depending on the course of the pandemic there may be a second Nose Con to get us through the spring and/or to christen our new game table when it arrives, but I am hopeful it will be taken over by larger cons going forward.
To be clear – there are no spoilers in my review – but there are a number of strong cautions (EASILY FOUND IN SHOUTY CAPS) included below to help you avoid possible spoilers!
Break In: Area 51 is part of a new series of escape room games – but this one has a slightly different take on the usual story. Instead of trying to break out or escape, in these games, you’re trying to break in! The box and components here are a huge part of the game. The box is a slanted hexagon that contains a 3D diorama of what you’re trying to break into… in this case, Area 51 – the mysterious area where there might be evidence of Alien visitors to our planet. We previously reviewed Break In: Alcatraz, the first game in this series.
World War II. That was what life was about in the first half of the 1940’s. Not only was it a terrible and bloody conflict, but so many of the world’s leading nations found themselves literally fighting for their very existence. It had to be an enormously stressful time and dominated the hearts and minds of those who lived through it.
Not surprisingly, gaming advances were limited during those years. Not only were people’s thoughts elsewhere, but the limitations on available materials made production and distribution of unessential items like games impractical. But in the years following the end of the war, it was as if the pent-up creativity of the previous six years finally found its voice. So many of the mainstream games which dominated play during the last half of the twentieth century originated during this decade. Not only was production back to normal levels, but the middle class was growing in size and they had the leisure time to indulge in gaming. I also have to feel that after a crushing depression and the horrors of a global war, the world was ready to have some fun. I think it’s a fair statement to say that modern commercial boardgaming begins in the years following World War II. Larry
Labyrinth(1940)
Labyrinth is a dexterity game created by a Swede named Sven Bergling. The object is to move a metal ball along a twisting path full of holes until the end is reached. The path is on a moving surface that you can tilt in both directions using knobs. The game is really fun, but my judgment is probably partly skewed by the fact that this was one of the very first games that my parents gave me when I was a child and that I really played for many hours. Many games produced in subsequent years drew inspiration from Labyrinth. Liga
