The Opinionated Gamers

I’ve always been attracted to the visual nature of board games.  They have the ability to be truly stunning works for art. To be beautiful, comforting, sleek, familiar, confounding, ingenious, colorful, and hopefully also functional.  I’ve written about this more obliquely in the past, but today I want to talk specifically about the board games hanging on my wall. I’ve always wanted to turn games into artwork to display on the walls of my home so that I can see it every day and share it with house guests.  Over the years, I have finally made a point of hanging more and more game art on my walls, and I thought it would be nice to share it with you. I’d also love to hear what others have done along these lines so that we can all be inspired by each others’ artistic gaming endeavors.

The story has to start, as all good stories do, with Crokinole.  Way back in 2007, I wrote Hilinski Brothers Tribute to talk about the incomparable beauty of the Crokinole boards made by Carl and Stan Hilinski.  To this day, I treasure my board – Cimarron… American cherry stain on birch, with a black cherry stained ditch, and a reflective chrome center.  And then in 2011, I asked all of my Opinionated Gamers colleagues to send me photographs of their game storage shelves. I wrote about those in OG: Cribs, celebrating the beauty and diversity of everyone’s board game shelves, along with the insight that they offer into the minds of each gamer.  I still talk about Nate Beeler’s color-coded scheme, Larry Levy’s lack of a digital camera, and Ted Alspach’s sweet setup! In the intervening seven years, I have upped my game with a few on-point decorative elements that I’ve been dreaming of doing for a long time now.

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Designer: Gunter Burkhardt and Wolfgang Lehmann

Publisher: AMIGO

Players: 2-5

Ages: 10+

Time:  45 minutes

Times Played: 2 times with a review copy

I came home from Essen with several new card games, all of which I was excited to try.  I couldn’t seem to get anyone to play Druids, though. “Oh, I don’t hear good things about that one” they’d say, and we’d move on to another game. Some of the other card games did indeed turn out to be not so great, and I stopped bringing this to game day, figuring it was as mediocre as the others.  A few months passed and, as I was packing for a game convention with a flea market, I threw this in the bag, figuring if nothing else I could sell it. Thankfully I was able to recruit some players and give it a try, because I quite enjoyed it – and is often the case, it is best not to listen to negative reviews from people who have yet to try a game.

Druids is a card game for 3 to 5 players. While the box and the art look somewhat similar to Wizard, the game play is different.  Players are novice druids learning how to control different domains while at the same time learning to pace themselves and not try to control too much.

The five suits

The game comes with 60 cards in 5 colors as well as 5 special cards –one Gaia, two Golden Sickle and 2 Mistletoe cards – that do not belong to any of the color suits.

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