Dale Yu: Review of Garum

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Dale Yu

Garum

  • Designer: Ricardo Jorge Gomes
  • Publisher: Pythagoras
  • Players: 2-4
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by Pythagoras

Each year while preparing for SPIEL, I try to seek out two or three games from companies /designers /countries that I haven’t looked at before – this year, Garum was one of the games on that short list.  I’m a sucker for anything about Ancient Rome – heck, I toyed with the idea of majoring in Classics in college – and this one caught my eye.

I have always had a passive interest in going to LeiriaCon – held in Portugal – as I have talked to fellow OG’er Joe Huber and his trip there – so I had at least heard of the company.  Anyways the title of the game is the name of the pungent fish sauce that I have read so much about in my historical fiction novels, and I wanted to give this one a try.

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Posted in Essen 2019, Reviews | 2 Comments

Patrick Brennan: Game Snapshots –2019 (Part 27)

Posted on December 26, 2019 by pfbrennan

At time of writing, I’ve just finished our Essen weekend here in Sydney with 100 of my closest gaming friends (here’s a shoutout to the glorious Advent Games for organising and hosting), which means I have a bank of snapshots to come, fastly and furiously.

Photo: Eden Hills Country Fire Service (Facebook)

Sadly, much of Australia has been burning with wildfires this month.

I’ve played probably 40 to 50 of the Essen crop now, including most of the ‘name’ Essen games. I’m still missing a few which are lined up for the coming weeks but I think I’m ready to call Maracaibo Best In Show, with Expedition To Newdale a second, making Pfister my Designer of Show. Both have card effect engines at their heart and provide campaign options, elements which vastly improve its chances of holding my interest for longer than a few plays,  and which give cause to get it to the table more than the standard Euro-few times.

Featuring today? How an Essen game earns a 1.

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Posted in Sessions | 8 Comments

The Opinionated Gamers opine about the classics

Posted on December 25, 2019 by Joe Huber

Recently, thinking about the question of classic boardgames, I wondered – what do the other Opinionated Gamers think about such games?  Are they beloved? Warmly remembered? Or barely tolerated?

So, I asked.  And – the answers run the gamut.  But there was a strong response, so I decided to put together this article, allowing folks to share their memories of various games.  Not all of the games I asked about are included here; only those with some reasonable measure of support.

Oh, and before anyone asks: no games first published after 1975 are included, no public domain games are included, and only games from major mass-market publishers are included.  And, unfortunately, there is a US-centric tone to the list; that’s my fault.

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Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Die Crew: Reist gemeinsam zum 9. Planeten – Review by Eric Edens

Posted on December 24, 2019 by Dale Yu

Die Crew: Reist gemeinsam zum 9. Planeten

Review by Eric Edens

Die Crew

  • Designer: Thomas Sing
  • Publisher: KOSMOS
  • Players: 2-5
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 5-20 min per mission

As I write this I am still seeing the cards in my head from the nearly 15 hours I played of this game in a less than 40 hour span.  Frankly, I was a bit obsessed with the game and so was my group but you’ll have to read on to see if I was playing because I liked the game or if I was playing because I just couldn’t figure it out.

I’ll let fellow Opinionated Gamer Chris Wray explain the rules.

Die Crew is a cooperative trick-taking game with 50 different missions. In many ways, it is a standard trick taking game: players must follow suit, there are trump cards (which can only be played if you can’t follow suit), and the highest value of suit led wins unless there is a trump card.

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Posted in Essen 2019, Reviews | 8 Comments

All Fun and Games

Posted on December 23, 2019 by Joe Huber

I play games to have fun.

The problem with that statement, of course, is that having fun means different things to different people.  What might be fun for me might not be fun for others; further, as Wei-Hwa notes, maximizing fun for all can mean minimizing fun for some.  Imagine two players, one of whom gets +10 fun from winning, -10 fun from losing, and another for whom it’s +1 and -1, respectively. To maximize fun, the first player would win every single time.

But at the same time – often folks have independent, or even complementary, ways of having fun, and even when two players have the same focus they might both be fully satisfied over the course of a number of games played.  In bringing up this topic, I was pointed to a couple of interesting lists of types of fun. Jonathan Franklin pointed me to https://goblinartisans.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-8-kinds-of-fun.html, which categorizes fun into eight groups: Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery, Expression, and Submission.  Opinionated Gamers’ own Melissa Rogerson argues that for hobby boardgamers, there are four key dimensions to enjoyment: Sociality, Intellectual Challenge, Materiality, and Variety.  While these taxonomies are useful, they don’t always align well to what I think of as fun.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Dale Yu: Book Review – She’s Got Game by Laura Heffernan

Posted on December 22, 2019 by Dale Yu

She’s Got Game

  • Author: Laura Heffernan
  • Publisher: Lyrical Press (2019)
  • Book “purchased” from Amazon.com – via Kindle Unlimited – https://amzn.to/2PuA1BT

Yeah, this isn’t the sort of thing we normally review here, but it involves boardgames, and we’ve been on sort of a book review kick here this year…

So… Reading romance novels is an occasional occurrence here – and something that most people don’t know about me. Well, actually, it’s just reading in general.  Per Goodreads, I have averaged about 120-130 books per year over the past 5 years – and I do try to make a habit of setting aside half an hour a day to get a chance to escape into a book and simply turn my brain off.  I have a Kindle at home and a beloved Kobo Aura that both get a LOT of use.  As I use the Kindle as a way to escape, my books are almost exclusively fiction – young adult, dystopian, cozy mystery, sci-fi, and even the occasional chick lit/romance novel (usually suggested to me by my wife… and easy to obtain via our shared Amazon library).

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Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments