EXIT: The Stormy Flight — a nice activity to do while shut in at home (and spoiler free)
Designers: Inka and Markus Brand
Publisher: KOSMOS
Players: 1-4
Ages: 12+
Time: about 60 minutes
Times played: 1 (with review copy provided by Thames&Kosmos)
The EXIT series was one of the original puzzle-game franchises to hit the market when the escape room game craze took off a few years ago. To date, my family and I have been able to play all of the ones released here in the US, and this is a series that we continue to look forward to future installments. While there are many worthy competitors in the genre, the EXIT series is possibly the best known of the bunch – due in part to the initial set of games being awarded the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres award.
Times played: 4, with review copy provided by Studio H
Oriflamme is a game that I surely would have guessed was French if I had sat down to play it and didn’t know anything else about it. And, I am not using “French” as a pejorative adjective; this is a card game with plenty of take-that, with wild swings in action often based on the action of a single card. Bruno Faidutti has made a career out of similar sorts of games, and this game clearly relies upon its Gallic predecessors. I could make your read of this review short – if you like games such as Mascarade or Citadels, I’m pretty sure that you’ll like this one.
It has been fairly well received since its debut at SPIEL 2019, most recently winning the 2020 As d’Or (the French award for Game of the Year) To help put this award in context, other nominations for this year included party board game Fiesta de los Muertos and dino-park sim Draftosaurus. The complex game award for the year went to Res Arcana…
Designer: Mark Gerrits Publisher: Moaideas Game Design Players: 3-5 Ages: 8+ Times Played: 7 on a variety of copies, including a prototype they sent me
I first played Mini Express somewhere in the middle of unincorporated Macoupin County, IL. In this game, that’s sort of the hex where you’d expect St. Louis to be, but it isn’t. I was on a train, and Moaideas had been kind enough to send along some files so that Rand and I could play it during RollingCon last year, our annual mini-convention of train games aboard a train as we take the Amtrak from Chicago to Dallas for BGGCON.
I was excited because the designer had put out a few intriguing train games previously, with SteamRollers (a roll-and-write take on the Age of Steam system) and Mini Rails. While I try below to focus on Mini Express, there are a few times I compulsively talk about Mini Rails. If you’re not familiar with it, it won’t impede things; the talking points are that it is a svelte train game with minimal rules, no money, and only two actions: take a share or lay track. (I mean, I’d get on that elevator with you.)
Mini Express keeps the same turn structure (acquire a stock or lay track) and absence of money as Mini Rails, but applies them to the “cube rail” genre, where colored wooden tokens are laid across a geographic hex map, usually aiming to hit certain cities; likely some sort of cost to placing in the same location as another company; and placement limits for certain hexes. We have some of all that here, but a few things also have their middle parts turned topwise.
(This is a handmade prototype, so components subject to change, etc.)Continue reading →
Two-player games have a special place in our hobby. Not only are they historically significant — many of the classics like Chess to Go are for pairs of players — but they are also especially relevant for those of us that play a lot of games at home. Though these head-to-head games might be often overlooked by publishers (because they reportedly don’t sell well), many of the hobby’s most revered games are for two. The International Gamers Awards even have a special 2-player category.
Today’s article is part of our “10 Great” series that features 10 great games in a given subcategory. I pick a mechanic, theme, publisher, etc. In this case, I picked a set number of players. We here at the Opinionated Gamers then all vote behind the scenes to create a list of 10 great games that meet the criteria. We’re aiming for an article a month, and I’d love your suggestions about future lists.
Over the next few months, instead of going with my Three Games articles, I am going to take a look at my collection and try to discuss why certain titles survived the great purge of 2019. During this process I may take a look at some games that didn’t survive, but only as a measuring stick for what did survive. Since I am silly, like a lot of gamers, I use Ikea Kallax shelves to display the games that we own. This makes it pretty easy to break things down cube by cube, so that’s what we’re going to do, twenty-four cubes, plus a top shelf for games that don’t fit in the cubes, over the course of a few months. I hope you enjoy!
If you are a BoardGameGeek user, you can also follow along on the Geeklist I created.
Recently, I have rekindled my love for the game Guildhall. It’s a wonderful hand management game with some fun, simple tableau building. Usually when games like Guildhall resurface into my rotation, it’s because there was another game from the same designer that we had recently played. This time it happened in reverse. We played Guildhall and then I went in search of other games from the designer, Hope S. Hwang. What I found was another game that features set collection and adds to it a light tableau building mechanism, Ganymede, and I decided to take a chance.
10 Great 2-Player Games (Article by Chris Wray)
Two-player games have a special place in our hobby. Not only are they historically significant — many of the classics like Chess to Go are for pairs of players — but they are also especially relevant for those of us that play a lot of games at home. Though these head-to-head games might be often overlooked by publishers (because they reportedly don’t sell well), many of the hobby’s most revered games are for two. The International Gamers Awards even have a special 2-player category.
Today’s article is part of our “10 Great” series that features 10 great games in a given subcategory. I pick a mechanic, theme, publisher, etc. In this case, I picked a set number of players. We here at the Opinionated Gamers then all vote behind the scenes to create a list of 10 great games that meet the criteria. We’re aiming for an article a month, and I’d love your suggestions about future lists.
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