Brandon Kempf – Surviving the Purge 15

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Brandon Kempf

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.

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2020 American Tabletop Award Winners

Posted on March 28, 2020 by Brandon Kempf

Wow, that was quicker than I had thought. I had thought there would be more build up and a bit of drama, but the award winners have already been announced.

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Brandon Kempf – Surviving the Purge 14

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Brandon Kempf

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.

Sooooooo, this is the almost embarrassing shelf. I have a bit of an obsession with Modern Art and we’ll talk about that later, but I just wanted to be up front, I own too much Modern Art and plus I have two more copies ordered. Yeah, I know, I have a problem. 

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Dale Yu: First Impressions of Contact

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Dale Yu

Contact

  • Designer: Steffen Benndorf
  • Publisher: NSV
  • Players: 2-5
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 20 mins
  • Played with review copy provided by NSV

Contact is a game that is not necessarily in my comfort zone.  I’m always skeptical of games with “limited communication” – sometimes I find the restriction too artificial, and it ends up frustrating me.   To balance that out, I generally like Benndorf games, so this one was worth trying no matter what. Which side will win out here?

In Contact, you follow a signal while knowing neither exactly where it comes from, nor who sends it out. This signal wants to lead you to a certain planet, but instead of space coordinates, you receive only a strange sequence of flight instructions for your spaceship. Can you identify the right target planet from this signal? And what will you find when you get there?

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Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade: First Impressions

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Mark Jackson
  • Designers: Geoff Englestein
  • Publishers: WizKids
  • Players: 1-4
  • Time: 20-40 minutes
  • Times Played: 5 (with a promo copy published online by WizKids) 

I’ve played a decent amount of pinball in my day. (Seriously, I’m 55 years old… I can remember the first time I saw a Pong game and those heady early days when arcades were mostly pinball machines with a couple of Pong machines and the consoles with Breakout and Night Driver were the hot new thing.) I was never terribly good at it – but I enjoyed it immensely.

I’ve also played a decent amount of board games.

OK, I give. I’ve played a ridiculous number of board games. (According to the Geek, I’ve rated almost 3200 different games – which is likely to have missed a few over the years.) But I never thought those two interests would coincide.

Until now… and Geoff Englestein’s latest interesting take on game design, Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade. 

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Dale Yu: Review of The Longing (PC Game on Steam)

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Dale Yu

The Longing

So, I haven’t played many computer games since college (you know, back when I had some killer 16-bit games on my 386 gaming tower)… But, over the past few months, I have started to get back into the realm of computer games.  While the focus of the Opinionated Gamers will always be physical board games, from time to time we may still write about books, computer games, puzzles or whatever else catches our fancy. Last month, I reviewed Luna the Shadow Dust, and this game comes from the same publishing house.

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