Dale Yu: Review of Combo Up

Combo Up

  • Designer:  Katja Stremmel
  • Publisher: Amigo
  • Players: 3-5
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

Who has the best combo? Outbid each other with your card combos and improve your hand round by round. Save yourself from having to quit with your reserve cards and foil the other players’ plans with special cards. If things don’t go entirely smoothly, you’ll have to spend a life token. Try to avoid this, because the first player to run out of life tokens loses the game while all the others win! 

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Dale Yu: Review of Burger Slam

Burger Slam

  • Designer: Christoph Behre
  • Publisher: Amigo
  • Players: 2-5
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 20 minutes
  • Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Ny7s3K 
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

You’re the proud owners of a Sixties diner. Your specialties are the worldrenowned Standard Burgers and Big Burgers. Especially remarkable is how simple your burgers are, because they only consist of four types of toppings. Pick the toppings you’ll be using: meat patties or veggie patties? Lactose-free cheese or cheddar? Cherry tomatoes or dried Italian tomatoes? Anything goes! Who will manage to get the most correct burgers out when orders are flooding in?

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Dale Yu: Review of Moving Day

Moving Day

  • Designer: Mads Floe
  • Publisher: Piatnik
  • Players: 2-4
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

July 1st is “Moving Day” in Québec, Canada. It’s no joke as more than 100,000 people (!) move on this special day. Why? Starting in the 1700s, by law all leases would expire on the same day. The law has since been changed, but landlords and renters still stick to July 1st as the universal moving day. And since so many people are moving on the same day, it’s of course near impossible to hire movers or even rent moving trucks — so everyone in the community shows up to help you move!

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Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 1)

Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 1)

It’s the first drop for the year so let’s lead off with the 2024 stats. The numbers are generally lower due to the chunk of time I spent getting body and mind in sync and in a healthier space but I played:

          78 new-to me titles

          188 different titles

          754 games

10+ plays:

  • The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (68)
  • Gloomhaven (40)
  • Texas Showdown (37)
  • Just One (34)
  • Tranquility: The Ascent (23)
  • Tranquility (21)
  • Forest Shuffle (20)
  • Daybreak (20)
  • Martian Dice (13)
  • Oh Hell (13)
  • Sky Team (13)
  • Barbu (11)
  • Darwin’s Journey (10)
  • Now Boarding (10)

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Opinionated Gamers 2024 Essen SPIEL Quick Takes – Part 3

 

We’ve started a tradition of writing a group document with very short takes on the games that we play.  Of course, you’ll not get as much info as in a full review, but as our reviews likely won’t start for awhile, you can at least get a glimpse into what we think about certain games.   The OG writers can leave their initials at the end of a comment if they want attribution…

We’ll post this to the blog every few weeks to give some thoughts on each game. This will be the final one for the year… 

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Best New (to me!) Games of 2024

Top row: Unmatched: Realms Fall, Spy Guy Pyramid, Pixies
Second row: 3 Chapters, Distilled, Let’s Go Tokyo
Third row: SETI, River Valley Glassworks, Undaunted 2200: Callisto
Bottom row: Zoo Tycoon, Heroscape, Ascending Empires: Zenith Edition

Look, I play a lot of games. In 2024, that included right around 160 new games… well, new to me games. That’s pretty typical – it was approximately 145 in 2023 and 150 in 2022. (I’m privileged and blessed to have two gamer sons as well as a number of small invitational events that give me exposure to new games – as well as the review writing I do here as a part of the OG site.)

So, for the last thirteen years, I’ve intermittently published my Best New (to me!) Games list… and, when I missed a year or two, I added the missing lists to the most recent post.

However, before we get properly started with my list for 2024, we need to cover a few games that were excluded from the top ten list for various reasons but still warrant attention being paid to them.

Where appropriate, I’ve linked to OG reviews of the games I mention… please, take the opportunity to enjoy more of this wonderful site we call home.

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Posted in Best Of, Commentary | Tagged | 12 Comments