Dale Yu: First Impressions of Horrified

Posted on September 17, 2019 by Dale Yu

Horrified

  • Designer: Prospero Hall
  • Publisher: Ravensburger
  • Players: 1-5
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 45-60 minutes
  • Times played: 2, with review copy provided by Ravensburger

Horrified was one of the hotly advertised games at GenCon 2019 – or at least one that I kept hearing people talk about.  In this game, a group of Heroes work together in the most haunted village in the world, battling against some of the most famous movie monsters of old.  In Horrified, six different classic movie monsters are available (Dracula, Frankenstein and his Bride, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, WolfMan, the Mummy and the Invisible Man), and your group will fight against 2-4 of these baddies, who for some reason have decided to descend upon your little town at the same time.  Each Monster has specific and unique defeat criteria – and in order to win, the team must vanquish all the Monsters. The players will lose if they let the Terror Level get too high or if they run out of cards in the Monster deck (meaning they have taken too much time to defeat the Monsters).

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Dale Yu: Essen Preview of Kung Fur Fight

Posted on September 16, 2019 by Dale Yu

Kung Fur Fight

  • Designers: Po-Jen Hsieh, Yunus Hsieh
  • Publisher: Enjoy Thinking Studio
  • Players: 2
  • Time: 30 minutes

Kung Fur Fight is a two player game where players take sides in the oldest rivalry of all-time: Cats vs Dogs!  The fight happens on the Arena board, where there are three different battle locations.  Each player also gets a board which is used to store Food tokens as well as to keep track of your card limit for the round.  Finally, there is a scoreboard with two separate tracks on it – the Spirit track and the Victory Point track.  Each player chooses a side, takes the 9 cards for his faction, and any special tokens that go with them.  There is also a shield that goes up so that each side can plan their card play in secret.

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Posted in Essen 2019, Preview | 1 Comment

Copenhagen (Game Review by Brandon Kempf)

Posted on September 15, 2019 by Brandon Kempf
  • Designers: Asger Harding Granerud & Daniel Skjold Pedersen
  • Artist: Markus Erdt 
  • Publisher: Queen Games
  • Players: 2-4
  • Time: 20-40 Minutes
  • Times Played: 5

“You know, it’s really kinda weird how they paint and build the buildings in Copenhagen, but it is far more colorful than it is here.”

Polyomino games are a thing, they keep popping up on the radar in different forms, roll and write (Brikks), puzzle (NMBR 9), two-player quilting (Patchwork), the list goes on and on and on. So in order to kind of stand out in what is becoming a very crowded field of games, you have to try something a bit different, a bit brighter, a bit bolder, and that brings us to Copenhagen from Queen Games and designers Daniel Skjold Pedersen and Asger Harding Granerud. 

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Dale Yu: Essen Preview of Zoomate

Posted on September 14, 2019 by Dale Yu

Zoomate

  • Designer: Ching Chun Hung
  • Publisher: Intelligent Monkey
  • Players: 4-7
  • Age: 7+
  • Time: ~20 minutes
  • Preview copy provided to me by Taiwan Board Games

Each fall, I look forward to a care package sent to me from my friends at Taiwan Boardgames.  I have felt for a long while that the games from the Far East are underappreciated, though their exposure seems to be improving each year!  Sure, there are always hits and misses in each box, but I do love the exploration of the new games…

Well, there is a backstory here – but I can’t make much sense of it, so I’ll just throw it out there.  In some futuristic country, there is a power plant where Team Fire and Team Water are warring for control.  There is also a third team, which is Neutral, which strives to make sure that neither Fire nor Water takes control.  Each player is an animal (not sure why): octopus, monkey, cow sloth, iguana, buzzard or frog.  In most games, there will be one Fire player, one Water player and the rest are Neutral.  These roles are secretly assigned to each player at the start of the game.  You may not show your role to other players.

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Posted in Essen 2019, Preview | 1 Comment

Dale Yu: Review of Era – Medieval Age

Posted on September 13, 2019 by Dale Yu

Era: Medieval Age

  • Designer: Matt Leacock
  • Publisher: PlanB Games
  • Players: 1-4
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 45min
  • Times played: 7, with review copy provided by PlanB Games

Era: Medieval Age was one of my most anticipated games from GenCon 2019.  I am a big fan of Matt Leacock, and I like his games too… Roll Through the Ages was one of my favorite games of his, and this appeared to be in the same vein.  I was also quite intrigued by the promo images released over the summer with these colored 3D buildings, and I wanted to see what the whole “roll-and-build” thing was all about.   I was able to miss the 1km long line (perhaps a slight exaggeration) by a few minutes, and the game hit the table as soon as I returned from Indianapolis.

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Saturday at Buckeye Game Fest

Posted on September 12, 2019 by xitoliv

Last Saturday, I headed to Columbus, OH, for a board game convention on High St. I ate two meals at the North Market with Jeni’s for dessert. The CABS library was there. A consignment store & a “take a game, leave a game” couch. Artemis. Extra Life fundraisers. Play to Wins and a vendor hall.

But it’s September. Origins was three months ago.

This was a different downtown Columbus board gaming convention: Buckeye Game Fest.

Luke talked a bit about it a few days ago, and Dale has too, but today is my turn. As usual, I’m mostly going to talk about what I played, but I sprinkle in some additional quirks of the convention itself.

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Posted in Convention Report | 4 Comments