What Should One Do With a Stimulus Check?

In the United States there happens to be a lot of news covering the U.S. government passing a 1.9 trillion dollar COVID relief bill and people getting a “Stimulus Check.”  I’ve read a number of articles making suggestions of what people should spend their “stimulus money” on.  It ranges from paying down debt, paying rent and paying necessities, which is my first priority, and probably should be yours as well.  (I spent 6 months out of work during this pandemic so these priorities are my focus.)  A lot of people suggest putting the cash in savings for a “rainy day” or emergency fund, or replenishing your waning savings, which I second.  However these don’t exactly “stimulate” the economy.  But keeping a roof over your head, food on the table, keeping the heat on and having an emergency fund are essential and should be prioritized.  I am also a big proponent of tithing or charitable giving if your income and situation allows.  I find it’s extremely important to give back to your place of worship, your community or those around you that are less fortunate than you.

Which brings us to the other articles I’ve seen on what people may consider doing with their money.  In order to “stimulate” the economy, people typically need to spend money and spend it locally or on shops, stores, businesses and restaurants that they care about and want to help keep afloat.  And board games.  If your other needs are covered, you need to purchase lots and lots of board games.  Especially during a pandemic.  Board games for the family to play to keep the kids from killing each other.  Board games for you and your wife to play while gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes across the table.  Board games to play with your friends while Facetiming with a GoPro camera strapped to your head so your friends can see the board and play out their moves while interacting online.

Continue reading
Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Three Sisters (Game Preview by Brandon Kempf)

  • Designers: Matt Riddle & Ben Pinchback
  • Artists: Beth Sobel & Marlies Barends
  • Publisher: Motor City Gameworks
  • Players: 1-4
  • Time: 30-60 Minutes
  • Times Played: 3

This is a preview of a game that is currently on Kickstarter. I was kindly allowed a PnP copy of the game to play. I never promised Matt or Ben any kind review, or preview, but after playing it, I felt like I should. Spoiler alert, I am a backer, so here it goes. Oh and the Kickstarter can be found HERE!

One thing I love about Roll and Write games is the way that everyone tries to twist and manipulate the genre and make it something that it wasn’t before. Some Roll and Write titles are really easy Yahtzee variants that allow for some good ol fashioned dice chucking, some decide that the regular dice chucking needs a bit of a twist, or the game around it needs something else, like maybe trick taking (I’m also a backer of this one)? The main thing about Roll and Writes though seems to be that folks just absolutely love trying to tackle different things with them, small miniscule little tweaks that mean a world of difference while allowing the player to feel comfortable in what they are doing from the word go. We’re rolling some dice, and we’re writing or checking some things off on a board. Three Sisters is a lot of the later, it’s a familiar style of game with familiar mechanisms, but twisted just enough to make it different, and quite possibly the meatiest Roll and Write you throw down on your table, which is funny as there is nothing about cattle in this Gardening and Farming Roll and Write. Oh lovers of dice and rondels, prepare to rejoice. 

Continue reading
Posted in Preview | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Dale Yu: Review of Vampire the Masquerade: Vendetta

Vampire The Masquerade: Vendetta

  • Designers: Charlie Cleveland, Bruno Faidutti
  • Players: 3-6
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Review copy provided by Horrible Guild

According to Wikipedia – Vampire: The Masquerade is a tabletop role-playing game (tabletop RPG) created by Mark Rein-Hagen and released in 1991 by White Wolf Publishing as the first of several Storyteller System games for its World of Darkness setting line. It is set in a fictionalized “gothic-punk” version of the modern world, where players assume the roles of vampires, who are referred to as “Kindred”, and deal with their night-to-night struggles against their own bestial natures, vampire hunters and each other.

Several associated products were produced based on Vampire: The Masquerade, including live-action role-playing games (Mind’s Eye Theatre), dice, collectible card games (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle), video games (Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2), and numerous novels. In 1996, a short-lived television show loosely based on the game, Kindred: The Embraced, was produced by Aaron Spelling for the Fox Broadcasting Company.

Continue reading

Posted in Essen 2020, Reviews | Leave a comment

Dale Yu – First Impressions of Dive

Dive

  • Designers: Romain Caterdjian and Anthony Perone
  • Publisher: Sit Down!
  • Players: 1-4
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 30 min
  • Preview (final prototype) copy provided by Sit Down!

In Dive, players are deep ocean divers, taking part in a festival where they try to retrieve a sacred stone out of the depths of the ocean.  As they dive deeper and deeper, some friendly creatures will help them out (turtles, manta rays) while sharks pose a constant danger to all.

Continue reading

Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Dale Yu: Review of Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods

  • 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.

Continue reading

Posted in Essen 2020, Reviews | Leave a comment

Brandon Kempf – Three Games of February

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. 

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