Brandon Kempf – Three Games of Essen 2020 (A little bit heavier this time, but not a lot)

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Brandon Kempf

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.

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Whistle Mountain (Game Preview by Chris Wray)

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Chris Wray
  •  Designer:  Scott Caputo & Luke Laurie
  • Publisher:  Bezier Games
  • Artists:  Mila Harbar & Taylor Bogle
  • Players:  1 – 6
  • Ages:  12 and Up
  • Time:  60-90 Minutes

Whistle Mountain is a worker placement game designed by Scott Caputo and Luke Laurie.  Published by Bezier Games, the game is one of the more anticipated Essen 2020 titles, and it’ll be hitting store shelves in coming weeks.

Though Whistle Mountain shares some theming with Whistle Stop, a 2017 game designed by Scott Caputo and also released by Bezier, that game was more of a pickup and deliver game, and this one is more of a worker placement game.  Gone are the trains, and in lieu there are airships!

As I recently said in my one-line summary of the game, this is “a fun, heavier-than-expected polyominoes-meets-worker-placement game that is going to have an enormous amount of replayability.”  The game is a nice mashup of several different mechanics, and though I’ve only played a couple of times, I can already tell that Whistle Mountain is going to be one of those games with a lot to explore.  

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Dale Yu: Review of Cantaloop (Spoiler Free)

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Dale Yu

Cantaloop

  • Designer/Author: Friedemann Findeisen
  • Publisher: Lookout Games
  • Age: 13+?
  • Time: 2-3 hours
  • Times played: 1, with preview copy provided by Lookout Games

I was surprised to see Cantaloop show up on the SPIEL game list as I went through my final preparations for SPIEL.digital.   The last time I had talked to the folks at Lookout, they were thinking 1Q 2021 for a release; and as such, I had put any plans of a review off for a bit so that I could cover the newest and greatest from SPIEL 2020.  Welp, things change, and I’m dealing with it (by staying up late and writing a review when I should be sleeping!)  So… I’m not even sure if Cantaloop will 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 I wanted to share my experience in time for you to read about it at SPIEL.digital 2020.

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Dale Yu: Giveaway for Blinks – Core and Expansion Set! A modular electronic tabletop gaming system!

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Dale Yu

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a big giveaway here on the Opinionated Gamers. I will give a full review/explanation of the Blinks below, but let’s start with the details on how to enter our giveaway.

PRIZE: A Core and Expansion Blinks set.  This is 12 total Blinks, with 2 carrying cases.  Combined Value: $198.00.  Move38.com has graciously offered to dropship the set to the winner.  For more details on the Blinks: https://move38.com/products/blinks-core-set-6-blinks , https://move38.com/products/blinks-expansion-set-6-blinks

WHO IS ELIGIBLE:  Everyone*.   (if someone outside of the US wins the contest, we may have to work together on the shipping costs in excess of domestic US shipping.  If it turns out to be too expensive, we’ll work out an alternate prize and then choose someone else for the Blinks)

HOW TO ENTER:  You can get up to five entries into the contest – through this Google Form:

  1. Fill out the Google Form – https://forms.gle/ubzt69yWVxCK1yEZ8.   By entering, you also are signing up for email updates from our blog.
  2. Follow us on Instagram.  @opinionatedgamersblog
  3. Tag 2 of your friends on the Instagram contest entry post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CGkxInbB3iP/
  4. Follow us on Twitter @OpinionatedGmrs
  5. Tag 2 of your friends on the Twitter contest entry post: https://twitter.com/OpinionatedGmrs/status/1318615767139667969?s=19

CONTEST ENDS: 9:00 PM Eastern US Daylight Time on Wednesday, October 28, 2020.

Winners will be notified via their email entered on the Google Form.  If there is no response within 48 hours, a new winner will be selected.  

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Opinionated Gamers Spiel Want List Part 5

Posted on October 20, 2020 by lornadune

Jonathan F.: Other than Arnak (CGE) and CloudAge (Capstone), if Spiel were happening and I were going, these are the eight 2020 games I would be sure to look at. This list excludes popular US domestic releases because they will be easy to get any time as well as those with a 2021 or 2022 release date because those are likely prototypes to be crowd-funded and will evolve between now and their release date. Just so you know, since the pandemic started I have tended towards clever shorter games like Hadara, Res Arcana, Habitats, St. Petersburg, Race for the Galaxy, and Die Crew as well as deduction (not social deduction) and trick-taking games.

Cafe (Pythagoras) – Card patching, slight engine building, and coffee theme – looks light but not dumb. I like shorter engine builders and this has enough going on to make it interesting unless you don’t like the spatial manipulation of overlapping cards to make a larger machine.

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284936/cafe

Dwergar (Granna) – Worker placement, delayed gratification, and clever way you get new workers that might give you bonuses on subsequent actions.  Multiple decks where you use one each game. This might be a fine game in the vein of Raiders of the North Sea, or something special. 

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/291874/dwergar

Faza (self-published) – Review coming in the next month.  As a family, we have been playing quite a bit of Ghost Stories/Lost Bastion and Atlantis Rising (1st & 2nd eds.), so this looks like a natural.

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230860/faza

Influentia (Ludonova) – Trick-taker where the card you play may be the one you get, which affects your action in the other part of the game (shades of S-Evolution – which still interests me as an idea). I am curious to try it to see how it feels given that some hands will inherently be better than others. Ludonova’s other 2020 releases, Sumatra and Polynesia, look good too!

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/311191/influentia

Merv (Osprey) – It will have a domestic release, but I am listing it because it feels under the radar.  It is by the designer of Calimala and is not area majority, so on my list.  I also have a weakness for modular boards.

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/306040/merv-heart-silk-road

My Farm Shop (Pegasus) – Goa is a wonderful game and I like several other Rudiger Dorn games.  This might be a good game, or a simple one with lots of chrome.  I have no idea, but would check it out because of the designer and the dice manipulation plus shorter playtime. If this is more Machi Koro/Space Base, it is not really in my sweet spot.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/270636/my-farm-shop

Neko Harbor: the Card Game (The Wood Games) – I enjoyed its big brother, A Pleasant Journey to Neko, but it was a bit long for me. If this has a streamlined system and retains the hard choices of the original, it could be great.

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/290768/neko-harbour-card-game

Paleo (HiG) – A modular co-op from a publisher that always smooths the edges of design until they are silky smooth.  Sounds up my alley as the goal is to paint a mammoth on a cave wall so those in the future will remember you once existed. This is coming from Z-Man, so it might come and go in a blink.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/300531/paleo

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Feierabend (Game Review by Chris Wray)

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Chris Wray
  • Designer:  Friedemann Friese
  • Publisher:  2F-Spiele
  • Artists:  Lars-Arne “Maura” Kalusky
  • Players:  1 – 6
  • Ages:  12 and Up
  • Time:  45 – 75 Minutes
  • Times Played: 3 (On Review Copy from Publisher)

Friedemann Friese’s Feierabend, also known as Finishing Time, is an “after worker placement” game in which the players have a team of workers that just want to relax.  When the game begins, working conditions are awful — the players are poorly paid, work long hours, suffer from a gender pay gap, all of which creates a high degree of stress — but over the course of the game, they find room for some leisure and relaxation, while also improving their working conditions.  At the end of the game, the most relaxed team wins.

I once heard Friedemann Friese described as a “mad scientist” game designer, and while I think he defies labels, I think that’s perhaps the most fitting description I’ve heard.  He jumps in and out of different game mechanics — from the economics of Power Grid, to the trivia game Fauna, to numerous trick taking games — always innovating along the way.  Feierabend continues his trend of making engaging games in novel ways. 

Feierabend is, to me, one of Friedemann’s cleverest designs in years: the gameplay is simple yet deep, and the player interaction is quite high for an economic game.  Feierabend game is easy to play, but hard to master, and with no randomness at all, it is likely to appeal to the crowd that prefers “no luck” in gaming.  

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