Dale Yu: Review of Stellar

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Dale Yu

Stellar

  • Designers: Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback
  • Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
  • Players: 2
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: ~30 minutes

In Stellar, the two players are astronomers who are competing the see the most beautiful display of celestial objects in the night sky.  Each player has an array of 12 cards which forms a beautiful piece of art depicting a telescope. Players get two start cards; one of which is placed at the top of their telescope pyramid and one which is placed underneath the telescope in the Notebook area.   The rest of the celestial objects cards are shuffled and each player is dealt a hand of 2 cards. A market is set up with the top 5 cards of the deck being dealt beneath the numbered cards which go from 1 to 5.

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Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments

Brandon Kempf – Surviving the Purge 13

Posted on March 22, 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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Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

2020 American Tabletop Award Nominees

Posted on March 21, 2020 by Brandon Kempf

I absolutely love awards, even ones where I don’t have a stake in them. I’ll watch the Academy Awards with baited breath even though I’ve only seen the animated movies of the year — young kids. Most of all I love board game awards, I love the Deutscher Spiele Preis, I love the International Gamers Award and most of all I love the Spiel des Jahres and the awards that come with it, the Kenner and the Kinder. So I was more than happy to see a committee form last year and try their hands at something new, a more American version of the SdJ. While it definitely lacks in history and some of the credibility built up over the years of the SdJ, the American Tabletop Award is off to a good start.

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Posted in Commentary | Tagged , | 14 Comments

Brandon Kempf – Surviving the Purge 12

Posted on March 18, 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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Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Dale Yu: Preview of Trekking the World

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Dale Yu

Trekking the World

  • Designer: Charlie Bink
  • Publisher: Underdog Games
  • Players: 2-5
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 45-60 minutes
  • Times played: 3, with review copy provided by Underdog Games
  • Disclaimer – while I received a free prototype copy of the game to play in advance of the Kickstarter campaign, I received no other benefits (i.e. money) to play the game or write the review.

Trekking the World is a game that should be hitting Kickstarter later this week (or at least that was the original plan – given the way the current market is swooning; there may be some delay on the part of Underdog Games…). But, in the era of the coronavirus pandemic, this may be the only way that I’ll be seeing different parts of the world for quite some time… I have already had two trips canceled, and given the current climate, my annual trip to Essen appears to be in jeopardy (even though it is still seven months away!)  This game is meant to be the spiritual successor to Trekking the National Parks, a very popular game from 2014; that was re-released in 2018.

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Posted in Kickstarter, Preview | 3 Comments

Dale Yu: Review of Axio Rota

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Dale Yu

Axio Rota

  • Designer: Renier Knizia
  • Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
  • Players: 1-4
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 15-30 minutes on the box, 10-15 minutes in reality
  • Times played: 5, with review copy provided by Pegasus Spiele

The tagline in the rules says this is “A clever tile-laying game for 1-4 shrewd minds”.  Though, maybe it would better to say that it a clever tile-laying game for 1-4 ingenious minds…  In this game, players will place tiles to the board (in five of the colors/icons that you might have seen in Einfach Genial – I guess someone really hated the yellow circle).  Each player gets their own scoreboard which shows the five colors and a scoring track that goes from 0-12 in each color. As you might have guessed, each player also gets a colored cube which goes on each track.

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Posted in Essen 2019, Reviews | 3 Comments