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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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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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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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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