These days I don’t get a lot out of playing games I’m not that excited about. If I’m in danger of being dragged into multiple games of Flip 7 for instance, I’d rather stay home and read a book, or clean sewers or something. As a result, I find I’m putting in more work prior to each gaming session to organise what I’m playing and who I’m playing with (especially if it’s a public event). Let’s call it directed gaming for sake of a term.
With 3500+ titles under my wings, my directed gaming aims at getting games to the table that are either new-to-me or which have something special that’s begged for exploring. With nice people. Who are experienced gamers. Who play fast. It’s a beautiful world when it all comes together!
As a team of wildlife rangers, your mission is to ensure the well-being of different species in your wildlife reserve while protecting them from potential threats. In The Peak Team, a cooperative game by Scott Almes, 1-5 rangers work together to complete a variety of challenging tasks.
The main board represents the wildlife reserve, dominated by a towering mountain divided into distinct regions. Using a “reverse-drafting” mechanic, where each player assigns their cards to others, rangers will acquire the tools they need to explore the mountain via different paths and transportation systems.
By reaching various locations and observing wildlife, players will complete their personal missions and earn bonuses. Each ranger has two mission slots that fill up as soon as tasks are accomplished. Only by completing all missions before running out of actions will the rangers successfully fulfill their duty!
The Peak Team is built around a tiered level system, with the game increasing in difficulty and complexity as sessions progress. It strikes a careful balance between accessibility for newcomers and a rewarding challenge for seasoned players.
It’s cherry blossom season. As the beautiful sakura petals fall, a calm tranquility lingers in the air. It’s the perfect calm before the storm: welcome to the Sakura Slam! In this standalone sequel to Kabuto Sumo, players return as the wrestling Kabutomushi (“helmet bugs”) and compete to knock off their opponents on an all-new square arena. The coin-pushing mechanic returns, but with a new platform, characters, pillars, and powers.
I have strong memories of four books in my elementary school library. I loved The Twenty-One Balloons with its delightful line drawings and crazy tale of exploration and adventure. I was fascinated by D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. I can’t remember which version of the Robin Hood legends that I read multiple times, but it was wondrous.
And then there was Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights. I was blown away by the wide-ranging tales and myriad characters… the perfidious Mordred, the saintly but flawed Lancelot, the devout Sir Gawain, the mysterious Merlin. My classmates and I even wrote (and performed) a play about the fall of Arthur for a class project.
As I grew older, I experienced different takes on the legends: Mark Twain’s humorous A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, T.H. White’s brilliant and moving The Once and Future King, and – because my honors project in college was focused on John Steinbeck, his unfinished The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (based on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur). Thanks to being an English major, I was also subjected to the endless blank verse of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
My first R-rated film was John Boorman’s Excalibur – a glorious mess of a film that I would not recommend to younger viewers (it got an R rating for myriad reasons). In college, I got my first full viewing of Monty Python & the Holy Grail with a rowdy frat-boy audience on a huge screen… and I experienced the profound disappointment of seeing the film version Camelot (the musical).
More recently, I’ve read and re-read Stephen Lawhead’s splendid Pendragon Cycle. The original three books (Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur) were followed by two books of short stories (Pendragon and Grail), a modern-day “return of Arthur” novel (Avalon), and a just-published prequel to the series (Aurelia).
That’s a lot of King Arthur… and my knowledge of the tales doesn’t hold a candle to designer Andrew Parks, who took the original bones of Eric Goldberg’s Tales of the Arabian Nights game (first published in 1985) and created a richer and more coherent game experience by combining his deep love for Arthurian legend with clever game design improvements.
Railroad Tiles, a sequel to the roll-and-write series Railroad Ink, is a quick-playing tile placement game in which you pick tiles and place routes to build an interconnected community.
The game is played over eight rounds. You start each round by drafting your tiles from the sets available in the common pool, then you place your routes in front of you, trying to make as many connections as possible; be careful not to lock yourself in with choices that are too constraining. Each round, you can also place cars, trains, or travelers to populate the tiny little landscape you’re creating – as long as you have free space on your tiles. The available actions change from round to round, so you need to prepare in advance!
Designers: Franz-Benno Delonge, solo by Arnaud Charpentier
Publisher: Grail Games
Players: 1-2
Age: 10+
Time: 20 mins
Between the 8th and 11th centuries, the Vikings had the world holding their breath. Always on the lookout for new land, they aren’t above fighting their own countrymen. In this game, two clan leaders fight each other, using the right tactics, for a fruitful plot of land along Norway’s coast. They quickly build up villages at strategic locations and fight with anything they can to ensure the larger portion of the region for their clan. Fjords: the tactical battle for the best land!
The game is played in two phases: the first phase, placing tiles and farms, mixes luck and skill; the second phase, claiming fields, has a Go-like enclosure dynamic that is all skill.
