Dale Yu: Review of Point Salad

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Dale Yu

Point Salad

  • Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
  • Publisher: AEG
  • Players: 2-6
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 20-30 minutes
  • Times played: 3, with review copy provided by AEG

Point Salad is part of the 2019 Big Game Night project from AEG.  In previous years, AEG has kept the games a secret until the big reveal at the Big Game Night event at GenCon.  This year, AEG has chosen to take a different approach to the promotion of the new games, and they have given preview copies to the press and retailers will be able to start showing them on the Thursday of GenCon week.  The three games from this year are Curios, Point Salad and Walking in Burano.

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Dale Yu: Review of EXIT: The Catacombs of Horror

Posted on July 20, 2019 by Dale Yu

EXIT: The Catacombs of Horror

  • Designers: Inka and Markus Brand, Ralph Querfurth
  • Publisher: KOSMOS
  • Players: 1-4
  • Ages: 16+
  • Time: 3.5 hours in two sessions
  • Times played: 1, with review copy provided by Thames and Kosmos

The EXIT series was one of the original puzzle-game franchises to hit the market when the escape room game craze took off a few years ago.  To date, my family and I have been able to play all of the ones released here in the US, and this is a series that we continue to look forward to future installments.

While there are many worthy competitors in the genre, the EXIT series is possibly the best known of the bunch – due in part to the initial set of games being awarded the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres award.

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The Opinionated Gamers (Try To) Predict the Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres – 2019 Edition Final Guesses

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Chris Wray

For the past few years, our group of gamers has taken their best guess at trying to read the minds of the Spiel des Jahres jury members.  The nominations for the Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres were announced back in May, and we made our predictions shortly beforehand.  The winners will be announced on Monday, and you can usually watch the ceremony over on BGG or other places.  

As has become our habit, we’ve done our predictions in two parts.  This is the second of those parts, where once the lists are out, we do a second round of voting, limited only to the actual nominees.  (In the first round, we tried to guess the nominees.)

This year, we used a similar system to what we’ve used the past three years.  Each OG writer was invited to rank all three games in each category, with their top pick (what they see as most likely) getting 3 points, second pick getting 2, and final pick getting 1.  Vote totals are shown below.    

If you’d like to see the official information on and criteria for the award, please check out the Jury’s website.

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Kenny G – Keepin’ it Saxy (Game Review by Brandon Kempf)

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Brandon Kempf
  • Designer: Prospero Hall
  • Artists: None Listed
  • Publisher: Big G Creative
  • Players: 2-5
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Times Played: 2

“Don’t you dare turn on Kenny G to listen to while we play, damn it, you already did didn’t you, that’s why I feel like I am stuck in an elevator.” – Me

Don’t let Kenny lose his groove! Kenny G Keepin’ it Saxy is a cooperative, hand management styled game where the players will be playing cards, to help resolve events as fast as possible over six rounds in hopes of keeping all of the “Groove” points that Kenny has. 

At the beginning of the game, each player is dealt four cards. These cards are the different things that Kenny needs in order to squash the drama going on in his life. There are some special cards that allow the players to do different things outside of their normal choices on their turn, but for the most part the cards will have a color and a symbol on them that will match the items needed for the event to be dismissed. 

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Patrick Brennan: Game Snapshots –2019 (Part 14)

Posted on July 18, 2019 by Dale Yu
Sometime in July, it turns out that Australia was defeated at the Cricket World Cup by 8 wickets. So, here’s 9 of them to help them win? They had lots of other animals though, at least 2 ducks, one of which was a maiden duck, though I don’t even know how you would go about checking for that. JK. I’m not sure that anyone was going to beat England in England. At least AUS didn’t lose on a weird heartbreaking tie-breaker like the Kiwis. It would be like a NFL game going through overtime and then having the winner be the team which had the most first downs. Pretty arbitrary. But, rules are rules.

It’s been an infamously dastardly week in new-game territory. I’d like to blame it in on exploring the dregs of Essen 2018 but most of these come from before then, and it was actually one Essen game, Scorpius Freighter, that turned out saving the week from total gaming ignominy. Let’s think of it as jumping on grenades and taking bullets so you don’t have to!

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Dale Yu: Review of Century: A New World

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Dale Yu

Century: A New World

  • Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi
  • Publisher: Plan B Games
  • Players: 2-4
  • Ages: 8+
  • Time: 30-45 minutes
  • Times played: 4, with review copy provided by Plan B on game mats also provided by Plan B – all games played with New World alone

Century: New World (C#3) is the newest and final installation in the Century game trilogy.  A few years ago, Century: Spice Road (C#1) came out, and it quickly became one of my favorite games – a masterpiece of resource management and micro-transactions.  When that first game came out, Plan B was already teasing gamers with the idea that it was the first game in a set of three; each of which could be played alone, but also each possibly being a module in a game that could combine any or all individual components.   Last year, Century: Eastern Wonders (C#2) came out, and while I did not really much care for C#2 on its own, the combined game of C#1 + C#2 was a worthwhile addition to the series for me.

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