Nominated Games for the 2017 Meeples Choice Awards

Posted on June 17, 2018 by huzonfirst

The Spielfrieks user group has finished their first week of voting for the Meeples Choice Awards.  27 games have received nominations.  During the coming week, the voters will select their favorites from that group and the top three vote getters will be crowned as the MCA winners for 2017.

Here is the list of nominated games, in alphabetical order.

Altiplano
Azul
Barenpark
Charterstone
Clans of Caledonia
Codenames Duet
Dinosaur Island
Ethnos
Gaia Project
Gentes
Gloomhaven
Heaven & Ale
Jump Drive
Keyper
Lisboa
Magic Maze
NMBR 9
Nusfjord
Photosynthesis
Pulsar 2849
Rajas of the Ganges
Riverboat
Sagrada
Santa Maria
Sidereal Confluence
The 7th Continent
The Quest for El Dorado

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Dale Yu: Quick Report from a Quick Trip to Origins

Posted on June 15, 2018 by Dale Yu

I feel that I am blessed to be so close to some of the major gaming conventions – the proximity allows me to get away, even if only for a few hours, to check out the sights and sounds of the newest games.  Normally, I try to get one or two days free to see the show, but this summer has proven to be spectacularly busy with some unexpected kids’ soccer success (which keeps us in season still!) as well as a planned move to a new house later this summer.  The result of all this is that I pretty much have no extra time to take off work, so I ended up having to squeeze in Origins in about half a day.

 

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Dan Blum: Review of Stumblewood

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Dan Blum

Stumblewood

  • Designers: Charles Bossart and Sébastien Darras
  • Publisher: Gigamic
  • Players: 2-6
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 20 minutes
  • Times played: 2, with review copy provided by Gigamic

 

We can roughly divide games into “decision-making games” and “skill games,” with the latter group including dexterity games, speed recognition games, memory games, etc. – any sort of game where the primary focus is on a specific mental or physical skill. While there are certainly games that straddle the categories (Mamma Mia being a good example) most pretty clearly fall into one or the other.

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Making of Lone Sevens

Posted on June 13, 2018 by Joe Huber

You can thank – or blame, take your pick – Dale for this article; he suggested that I write it up.

Lone Sevens is a solitaire game I designed recently.  Ever since Rattlebones was released, I’ve thought that there were other interesting designs possible based upon the changeable dice.  Finally having a reasonable idea about one I wanted to work on, I started designing it – only to come up with an entirely different idea, which doesn’t use changeable dice, but which is inspired by the dice faces from Rattlebones.  But while thinking about these designs – shortly after playtesting them for the first time – I got to thinking more about what might be done.

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Dale Yu: Preview of the Apocalypse escape room box (spoiler free)

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Dale Yu

Apocalypse escape room box (preview)

  • Publisher: Argyx Games
  • Players: 1-5
  • Times played: 1, with partial preview game, as provided by Argyx Games

 

I was approached by the guys at Argyx Games to look at their new Escape Room project, called Apocalypse.  As you are probably aware, the Opinionated Gamers have done a number of reviews of escape room games, so this is something that we

This preview is only done from a small portion of the game – I was essentially sent the first episode or chapter of the story, but it was enough to give a good feel for what the entire project will be like.  This preview will not include any spoilers, and I cannot publish any pictures of my own lest I give anything away.  I will, however, use pictures taken from their webpage/campaign page. Continue reading →

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Dale Yu: Interview with Wolfgang Warsch

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Dale Yu

I had never really known about Wolfgang Warsch prior to the Gathering of Friends 2018.  I mean, I had actually already played The Mind, but I never knew who designed it… During that week of gaming, I found that there were three of his games at the show, and a fourth one which had some pretty rave reviews from the Europeans at the Gathering.  I decided to track down this new designer and see if he would like to chat a bit for an interview for our blog.

 

The following interview was done via email, over the course of about three weeks.  The timing wasn’t awesome – between my job, his job, his nomination for Spiel des Jahres, his nomination for Kennerspiel des Jahres and the birth of his child – but I think the following conversation gives a good picture of Herr Warsch and his games…

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Dale Yu:

Wolfgang, thank you so much for agreeing to participate in an interview for the Opinionated Gamers.

 

The reason that I’m asking you for an interview is that you have exploded onto the scene this year with four games that people can’t stop talking about or playing!  I am aware that you also did Dream Team in 2015, but language issues prevented me from ever playing it. Continue reading →

Posted in Interviews | 16 Comments