Ticket to Ride is doubtlessly the most famous of the train games. Fifteen years after Alan Moon’s creation won the Spiel des Jahres, it is as popular as ever. A new map — this time featuring London, baby! — was released at Gen Con. The trains are gone, with buses taking center stage, and as with Ticket to Ride New York, the playtime is shortened.
Continue readingDesigner: Yusuke Matsumoto
Artist: 別府さい (Sai Beppu)
Publisher: engames
Players: 3-4
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
Times Played: 5 with a review copy
Nokosu Dice was one of many trick-taking games released at Tokyo Game Market this fall. Rather, I should say, re-released. It was originally a 2016 release from Quoth Games, and one I wasn’t aware of until now.
The game has a number of interesting twists, each of which center around a pool of dice. Each player will have a few dice in front of them which act as an extension of their hand: a red die showing a 4 is the same as a red 4 card in your hand.
We’ll discuss it further below, but the key feature here, I think, is that you will bid for how many tricks you’ll win _after_ you play your hand of cards: you will play all of your cards, and all but one of your dice, with the face of the last die determining your bid.
“If you can’t say something nice, just don’t say anything at all”
-Probably my mother
Before we get too far, I love Gold West. It’s a favorite of mine, and recently survived “The Culling”. I love the thematic setting, I love the game play, and I love the look of it. I also love roll and writes. In fact, roll and writes have probably occupied the largest chunk of my gametime over the last year, just based on number of plays. So when I found out that TMG was publishing a roll and write based on Gold West, I was really excited and couldn’t wait to give it a play. What could go wrong?
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Butterfly is the newest release from one of my oldest friends in gaming, Stephen Glenn. Right when I was coming into the hobby, 1999 or so, I was playing Acquire games by Email – and one of the guys in that group was none other than Stephen Glenn. He may be best known for his debut game, Balloon Cup, which was recommended for the Spiel des Jahres in 2003 – but he has had a number of designs published since then.
Continue readingWe’re now a month past Spiel ’19, and on a recent visit to a local game store, I realized that many of the hottest games from the event have hit US shores. To help those who are holiday shopping (or shopping for their collections), I thought I’d offer thoughts on a few more games.
Earlier this month, I posted quick thoughts on 5 Essen 2019 games, including Babylonia, Maracaibo, Paranormal Detectives, Ticket to Ride Map Collection #7, and Vivaldi. This is a sequel article to that one, with 5 new Essen titles.
Continue readingBefore you do anything else, start the music file below. And then, let it be known that you have exactly 4 1/2 minutes to finish reading this review. Which might be hard, because you’ll be dancing along in your chair the whole time…
4 1/2 Minuten was a game that I knew nothing about prior to Spiel 2019. As you may have read in my No Return review; I usually don’t pay much attention to the games from moses as they are often literary based and almost always in German only. For many of their new releases, EN rules are available online, and the game components themselves are language independent.
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