Topic Discussions
Topic Discussions 339 posts
Reviews
Reviews 286 posts
Let me illustrate
Let me illustrate 24 posts
Exhibitions, Events, Conventions
Exhibitions, Events, Conventions 12 posts

The Mind (Saturday Review)

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If you are looking for an easy-to-teach, easy-to-carry, quick, fun, co-operative card game, then The Mind by Coiledspring Games is the right game for you. However, let's start at the beginning. The game is really simply: there is a deck of cards numbered 1 to 100, every players is dealt a certain number randomly from the deck, there is no turn order and everyone plays when they feel the time is right, without co-ordinating with each other, and as long as all cards are played in ascending order everyone wins. That's pretty much all there is to it. Sounds easy enough - but it's actually really hard - and that's what makes this game so interesting in my view, as it creates a new gameplay mechanism that I have not come across before.

Coming in 2019

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Let me start by wishing you a Happy New Year. I hope you enjoyed the holidays and had a chance to relax and recharge. Now that 2019, it's time to look ahead at my most anticipated games of the coming year. The list happens to consist purely of Kickstarter projects, because that is how I buy most of my games these days, but as the year goes on I will of course keep an eye other releases as well. The list is sorted in expected delivery order, rather than alphabetically or anything else. So here goes.

Top 5 Tabletop Games of 2018

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Yes, it is nearly the end of 2018, so it is time to list Tabletop Games Blog's top 5 games of the year. It has been a great year for tabletop games in general, and I have been lucky enough to play no less than 23 games over the year, including playtesting, PnPs, online games as well as games played during our weekly games night and at MeetUp sessions. So I thought choosing 5 out of those 23 games would be a good number.

Tabletop Player Profile – Updated

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It has been a couple of months since I last updated my tabletop player profile, as per Quantic Foundry's online form. So it's time to do it again and share the results with you. See the links at the bottom of this article to complete the form yourself, which I highly recommend, and my previous results.

We are family

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Christmas is just around the corner, in case you hadn't noticed, and soon it will be time to visit family and be merry together. For many of us, games will be part of this annual ritual, and I am sure we all have our selection of games that are tried and tested to be compatible with the varying experience within the various family groups who we will be seeing over the holidays. So here are those games that are my go to selection and come out whenever the wider family comes together - and not only at Christmas time.

Are pea G's?

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Inspired by a recent, and very brief, discussion on Twitter (nod to Kathleen Mercury and Paul Grogan), I decided to investigate the age old question of what makes a role-playing game a role-playing game. Now, let me say that this article is by no means exhaustive, and I am merely trying to touch on the main points only. Also, and this is sort of a spoiler, it turns out that the matter is unlikely to be settled any time soon, and different people have different views of what is a "true" role-playing game and what isn't, or what game is not a role-playing game, but has role-playing elements. Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter whether a game is, or is not, a role-playing game, as long as you enjoy playing it and have fun with others or on your own. So bearing all of this in mind, let's start.

Rise of Tribes (Saturday Review)

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Rise of Tribes by Breaking Games looks like your normal area control game with the usual random terrain made out of hexagonal tiles. The game is set in ancient, prehistoric times, and you move your tribe members around the terrain, collect resources, craft tools to upgrade your tribe's abilities and generally do things that you will have seen before in other games. However, look closer and you will see that there are at least two interesting mechanisms in this game, which make it stand head and shoulders above the rest.

Come together

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Tabletop games tend to encourage people to come together and enjoy some time together. Even solo games are often enjoyed in company with other solo players, and then of course you have a number of multiplayer solitaire games, where people play the same game at the same time, but basically everyone does their own thing. There are many way of people playing games together, so let me look at each one briefly in turn.

Mystic Vale (Saturday Review)

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Card games come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from the traditional games played for centuries throughout Europe to the modern card collecting, card drafting and deck building games. It is the modern deck building games that I want to focus on in this review. In Mystic Vale by Alderac Entertainment Group you don't just build your deck in the traditional sense, where you simple buy new cards to improve what you have. Instead you have a fixed deck where every card can be added to, meaning that you literally customize every card. That creates a very interesting mechanism not seen in other games.

I, Robot

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A lot of games now come with an option to play against an artifical oponent - often called an AI, or automa. Don't worry though, the AI won't try to take over the world and enslave humanity. Instead an automa is there to offer the option of an additional player. In fact, some games allow you to add multiple automa, if you so wish. Artificial oponents come in many flavours and often provide different levels of difficulty, allowing you to choose how tough you want your new opponent to be.