The Opinionated Gamers

Blokus Puzzle

• Designer: uncredited   (Blokus was designed by Bernard Tavitian)
• Publisher: Mattel
• Players: 1
• Age: 7+
• Time: as long as it takes 😊
• Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/2Y5jR71
• Times played: 4 separate sessions, having completed about 80% of the puzzles

Blokus Puzzle is a new release to me from Mattel – the company which owns the rights to Blokus, the colorful and popular family friendly abstract game.  This solo activity is not a game per se – it is a collection of 48 brainteaser puzzles which is set in the Blokus universe.

The player is given a cardholder with a plastic grid on the front of it.  Twenty one blue plastic Blokus pieces are also provided.  There is a deck of 48 puzzle cards, 16 each of three different types (more on this later)…  You choose a puzzle card and slide it into the holder.  The bottom of the card has outlines of a number of puzzle pieces; grab these shown pieces and then use those specific pieces to solve the puzzle.  There are plenty of black shapes on the puzzle cards.  These represent pieces played by your “opponents” and your pieces cannot overlap those black areas.  Additionally, on each card, there will be at least one blue piece printed on the card.  At least one of your playing pieces must touch a corner of this piece.  And, as in Blokus, you may not have any pieces of your color directly adjacent along a side – all your pieces can only touch at the corners.  You can lie adjacent to the black pieces.

So it’s July of 2019.  Why am I coming out with an article listing my favorite 2018 titles at this late date?

Well, first of all, it takes a while to try enough games from a calendar year to make such a list be accurate.  The ever increasing number of interesting games released each year, combined with the reduced amount of gaming I’m able to get in these days, means that I’m well into the next year before I have a good feel for what my favorites truly are.  Still, I was getting ready to write this article during April when a mishap led to a torn tendon in my knee. That made it hard to get to my computer and life basically got put on hold. Then, last month, came the Meeples Choice Awards, which I run every year, and I was devoting my time to that.  So this is coming out later than I’d planned, but hopefully most of you will still find it of interest.

Here are my top 12 games from last year, my Dirty Dozen, if you will.  Overall, I found 2018 very much to my liking. I discovered five games that I’d categorize as “great”, which is quite a healthy total, particularly given the lower number of games that I was able to sample, when compared to other years.  Each of these games are ones that I’d happily play and suggest. Here’s hoping to an equally good crop of titles during 2019!

For each game, I’ve provided a brief description, my reasons for liking them, and my OG rating for each one.  They’re given in order of preference, beginning with my Game of the Year:

1.  Blackout: Hong Kong – Alexander Pfister and eggertspiele continue to be an unbeatable combination.  You’re tasked with doing the best job of restoring Hong Kong, following a catastrophic power failure.  Every turn, you allocate three of your cards to gather resources or carry out actions. Then, you try to meet objectives on cards you acquired earlier (to allow you to put those cards in your hand or gain their abilities) and scout unrestored areas of the city (which yields resources and points).  There are a lot of different paths to victory and we continue to discover new ones. Playing cards to different slots seems a lot like Pfister’s earlier Mombasa, but I find the decisions harder here and a good deal of enjoyable planning is required to get it right. On the downside, the production isn’t up to eggert’s usual standards and the game occasionally runs long.  Still, it never drags and downtime isn’t an issue; with experience, we’ve been able to get this down to 2 hours, which is perfect for a game of this weight. In a strong year, this is unquestionably the highlight and I’m always ready to play it again. Rating: I love it! Continue reading →

It’s always a fine line to create a boardgame playable by children, but yet contains enough of a seed of strategy so that adults will also find it entertaining.  Dexterity components or memorization aspects are both popular mechanics to employ in order to “even out” a game’s challenges between young and old. Dragon’s Breath has a small dexterity component (players lift rings off of a column, causing the gems inside to spill out) but the game primarily revolves around betting on the expected results (which colors of gems will spill out the most.)  Since the gem spilling is fairly chaotic, the game does not need to handicap the adults. However, this does mean the game isn’t able to capture the interest of older gamers. 

Dragon’s Breath
Designers: Günter Burkhardt, Lena Burkhardt
Publisher: HABA
Players: 2-4
Ages: 5+
Time: 15-20 minutes
Link: https://www.habausa.com/dragons-breath/
(review copy provided by publisher)

The results of The Dice Tower Gaming Awards for 2018 have just been announced.  The Game of the Year is Root!  This gives it a clean sweep of the two major American-based gaming awards (earlier this year, the Golden Geeks also selected Root).

Root was chosen from a pool of 10 nominated games.  Here are the other nominated titles, in alphabetical order:

• Architects of the West Kingdom
• Brass: Birmingham
• Chronicles of Crime
• Everdell
• Rising Sun
• Teotihuacan
• The Mind
• Underwater Cities
• Western Legends

The voters also chose winners in 13 gaming categories.  Interestingly, Root did not win any of the major categories, such as Best Strategy Game or Best Family Game, which is unusual.  Teotihuacan beat it out for Best Strategy Game.  Here are the category winners:

• Strategy Game – Teotihuacan
• Family Game – Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar
• Party Game – Just One
• Co-op Game – Chronicles of Crime
• Two-Player Game – KeyForge: Call of the Archons
• Game Theming – Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game
• Most Innovative – Chronicles of Crime
• Game Artwork – Everdell
• Production – Rising Sun
• Expansion – Scythe: The Rise of Fenris
• New Designer – Wolfgang Warsch (The Quacks of Quedlinburg)
• Reprint – Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar
• Small Publisher – Leder Games (Root)

Congratulations to Cole Wehrle and Leder Games for winning with Root, along with all the other nominated and winning designers and publishers!