The Opinionated Gamers discuss the 2017 Golden Geek Awards

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Dale Yu

The winners of the voting for the 2016 BGG Golden Geek awards were just announced.  We’ve been talking about the winners amongst ourselves – and we thought it would be interesting to bring this discussion to the blog.

 

The methodology (taken from BGG):

 

The Golden Geek Award is given annually to the best new games of the year, as selected by you, the users.  In order to avoid voter fraud, we have adopted the following restrictions. Voting is restricted to either supporting users (having a supporter badge from any year is sufficient),voters who pay a one-time 20 GeekGold fee, or users who have purchased an avatar or a geekbadge.

 

First, there will be a nomination phase. Each eligible voter can nominate up to 10 items in each of the categories. The 10 items with the most nominations in each category will become the nominees for the final voting. You are not restricted to the list of suggested nominees.

 

The final voting will be resolved using a condorcet voting system – specifically the Schulze method. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

 

For those who don’t want to read the specifics of the system, users will rank the games in each category from 1 to 10, (with a 0 for no opinion), and, through some mathemagical computations, we will select the winner.

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Gang Up! A Criminally Fun Card Game

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Tery Noseworthy

Gang Up! A Criminally Fun Card Game

  • Designers: Robin Keizer and Paul van der Meer
  • Publisher: HOT Games/Czacha Games
  • Players: 3-5
  • Ages: 10 and Up
  • Time: 30 – 60 minutesTimes Played: 2, with a copy provided by one of the designers

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Gang Up! A Criminally Fun Card Game is a card game where players compete to be the boss and have the toughest gang. Players start the game with a hand of 6 cards.  These cards can either be gangster cards, which you recruit to form your gang, or influence cards that can help your gang achieve their criminal goals. Players also start the game with 5 status; you need status to recruit gang members, exert influence and commit crimes and being the first to achieve a status of 20 will win you the game.

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Dale Yu: Review of Portal of Heroes

Posted on March 19, 2017 by Dale Yu

 

Portal of Heroes

  • Designer: Johannes Schmidauer-Konig
  • Publisher: Mayfair
  • Players: 2-5
  • Ages: 10+
  • Time: 30-45 minutes
  • Times played: 3, with review copy provided by Mayfair Games

In Portal of Heroes, players are heroes that go through portals to the world of Molthar and “bind fantastic beasts” to you – which is boardgame rule speak for discarding appropriate cards in order to collect other cards. Continue reading →

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Play – The Games Festival

Posted on March 18, 2017 by Andrea "Liga" Ligabue

Play

Modena, once again, will be the Italian Gamers Capital. The 31st of March will start the ninth edition of Play – The Games Festival, the greatest games event in Italy with more than 80 exhibitors and more than 2000 tables for games.From 31st of March in the City and 1st and 2nd of April in ModenaFiere (Modena Exhbitors Hall) with more than 22000 square meters dedicate to games!

The official program closed yesterday with more than 400 events/tournaments ranging from Boardgames to Role Play Games passing from Miniatures, Collectable Card Games and Live Games.

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War of the Ring Anniversary Edition (Review by Chris Wray)

Posted on March 17, 2017 by Chris Wray

WOTRSetup

War of the Ring wasn’t the first game to use the intellectual property from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (LotR) trilogy, but it is arguably the game that dives deepest into Tolkien’s world.  The game was released in 2004 by a trio of designers out of Italy — Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi, and Francesco Nepitello — and was born out of a desire to create a game that simulated the struggle for control of Middle Earth.  As Di Meglio said in a 2016 interview, “Lord of the Rings was a mass-market IP, and most games were very simple, family-oriented. We wanted something which could give us, as players, a full immersion in the LotR Trilogy, with all the details.”

An Anniversary Edition of this 2005 International Gamers Award winner was recently released by Ares Games.  This limited edition features painted miniatures, a hardcover rulebook, an oversized game board, and several other nice touches.

This article has a brief photo tour of War of the Ring Anniversary Edition.  Please excuse my below-average photography skills.  I’m in love with this edition of the game, which I’ve taken to calling “my precious” (pun intended).  If you’re interested in the history of the War of the Ring or a review, I recently wrote an article in Counter Magazine, which is available through the BGG store.

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Dale Yu: Two Real Time Co-op Games – Dungeon Time (Ares) and Magic Maze (Sit Down!)

Posted on March 16, 2017 by Dale Yu

Dale Yu: Two Real Time Co-op Games – Dungeon Time (Ares) and Magic Maze (Sit Down!) 

Well, this is sort of an interesting coincidence… On the same day, I received packages from two different game companies with games similar in mechanism.  Both of the games promise a short (<15 min) co-operative game experience that use a sand timer. I thought it would be nice to review them together here.  If you read yesterday’s piece, it’ll seem like déjà vu all over again…

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