Topic Discussions
Topic Discussions 358 posts
Reviews
Reviews 316 posts
Let me illustrate
Let me illustrate 24 posts
Women in Board Games
Women in Board Games 59 posts

Coming in 2019

Post read time 10 min readLeave a Comment on Coming in 2019

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

Post read time 7 min readLeave a Comment on Top 5 Tabletop Games of 2018

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

Post read time 2 min readLeave a Comment on Tabletop Player Profile – Updated

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

Post read time 3 min readLeave a Comment on We are family

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?

Post read time 4 min readLeave a Comment on Are pea G's?

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)

Post read time 4 min readLeave a Comment on Rise of Tribes (Saturday Review)

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

Post read time 3 min readLeave a Comment on Come together

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)

Post read time 2 min readLeave a Comment on Mystic Vale (Saturday Review)

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

Post read time 3 min readLeave a Comment on I, Robot

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.

Haspelknecht: The Story of Early Coal Mining (Saturday Review)

Post read time 4 min readLeave a Comment on Haspelknecht: The Story of Early Coal Mining (Saturday Review)

Haspelknecht: The Story of Early Coal Mining, to give it its full title, is a kind of action selection game by Quined Games set in the Ruhr region of Germany. The game is set at a time when the area was still covered by forests and coal was first discovered close to the surface. During the game your task is to dig up that coal until its depleted and you have to start digging deep pits to get to this precious resource. The great mechanism in this game is the action selection element, where you draw all tokens of one colour from one of a number of common pools at the start of each round. These tokens are then used to activate your workforce and develop new technologies. It sounds simple, but it creates a really complex, interesting game with lots of options and very few player interaction.