Illumination: An Original Game about Medieval Manuscripts
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By Mitchell Thomashow   Â
Illumination is a highly original, deeply absorbing, and wonderfully challenging new two player game. It’s the latest creation of the imaginatively fertile mind of designer Alf Seegert, who also happens to be a Professor of Fantasy Literature. It is elegantly enhanced by the fine production of Gryphon Games, and the exquisite art of Jake Seven and Claire Campin.
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Here’s a brief synopsis. You are either a reverent or irreverent monk competing to illustrate three manuscripts, while also gathering ritual tokens to display at the local monastery. The theme is a charming and often whimsical dressing for what is a highly competitive abstract game. How does it work?Â













Brandon Kempf – Three Games of 2020
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.
In an upcoming collaboration article, The OG is going to look at our favorites of 2020. Chris dropped his favorites the other day and I’m going to drop my favorite three of the year in a Three Games article.
It was a weird year for a lot of reasons, and I think due to how things shook out, the games industry saw some really big booms with sales, but I think the games themselves suffered. Lack of playtesting and developing opportunities has to have hindered how things are done. Saying that, I think that there were some pretty good games released this past year, but the dropoff after the good games is more severe. No one wants to listen to my weird theories and ramblings, so lets get started with Three Games of 2020.
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