New this month was **Kashgar: Händler der Seidenstraße** and that one was only new to me, but not really new (it’s from 2013). I only learnt of it watching a rahdo runthrough and immediately thought that could be a good one for us – and when playing it this month, it quickly became one of our favorites. Mostly because of the really nice integration of card abilities and theme – it’s easy to remember what cards do when you read their title, because most of the card titles and their mechanics make sense together (ok, not the tailor, I still don’t get why a tailor gets someone from the street, putting it in front of your caravan and all that for only one pepper …). It’s a really fun “open deck builder” where you manage three different decks of cards, rotating them through their cards, using their card abilities. Really cool. The other new game was **Pandemic: The Cure** and that one really is new in Germany. I like it as an easy coop dice chucker. Not sure if I like it more than other dice games I have (VivaJava TDG, Elder Sign and Nations TDG especially), but since it is coop, I guess it will get more play – we need to take out the tension from time to time in our weekly group, and this one works for that. Not yet sure if I like this one better than Forbidden Desert – the visuals of FD are really fun in comparison to the quite bland visuals of Pandemic: The Cure. And I like the spatial aspects of FD. Oh, and regarding gencon: I’m german, so no comments on that. Ask me after Spiel 😉

I still play it every now and then and I quite like it. The many modes is actually a real benefit, but is a bit of a problem, too, especially for solo: many cards have abilities centered around interaction. That is true for both faction cards and publi…

I recently went into digging about Magic the Gathering: Arena of Planeswalkers. Looked quite fun, it is based on Heroscape and gives a nice and fast arena-style mini skirmish game. A new expansion is already announced with two more planeswalkers. I did…

exactly. If it gives you more information than you had before or if someone reacts to it (and therefore giving you information on his secret tools probably), it’s too late. until then, if you can reliably backtrack, I am fine with you doing so. I win o…

Yikes, you are right. I probably need two now 😉 – finally a good finisher for a mill oriented Mimeoplasm?

Yeah, slobad is happy about another colorless exile spell with a hunk attached. Especially since it does not disturb his welder shenanigans. I don’t know how I can justify that thematically, though, because normally he only throws phyrexian stuff at pe…

I almost always go solo. Two handed takes up too much table space for me. There are a few quests that really need multiple hands, but since I have everything available, I just play different quests.

With your selection I would suggest **Smash Up** – good ice breaker and easy to teach, in part preconstructed like SotM and funny. And even if you have multiple sets, easy to pack tight.

I had great success to get people into board games with **Waggledance**. It has a super cute theme, managing a beehive with a dice-worker-placement mechanic, has very quick turns and each turn has a moderate options to take, so AP usually doesn’t raise it’s ugly head, even with muggles. I brought my back-then-no-gamer wife into it with just two plays, or just recently got my parents to play it who normally only ever played stuff like “Mensch ärger dich nicht” or Monopoly. It’s really easy to get into and provides enough depth for when people start to strategize. And even if there is a gamerly gamer in that play group, still less competetive gamers have a chance to win. Oh, and it’s really fun to play. Another good one is **Paperback** – again, I had great success to get muggles to play it and usually it just takes a few rounds for them to grasp the basics. Sure, they won’t fully leverage the card abilities, but the good thing about the game is that you can make good points just by finding scoring words. And stuff like “draw +3 cards” are quite obvious after they seen it just once happen and so will soon start to look for abilities, too. A blast to play and the favorite game of my wife. **Kashgar: Händler der Seidenstraße** is another good one if you can read german or get the english translation from BGG. What I love about it especially is that it has deck building mechanics, but in open viewable decks. So it is easy to help people in their first rounds, since there is no hidden information. It’s very visual due to the three caravans layed out openly and most abilities of members of the caravan make sense directly. It gives a much better connection to the power of deck building than actual deck builders, because you can directly see how your caravans change. And it allows to create ridiculous engines that make people smile when they get it going. **Forbidden Desert** is still my favorite game to get people into coop games if they never played any, because it looks great on the table, has simple rules and still gives a ton of discussions about who should do what – while still throwing wrenches into the wheels of your plans, so you have to re-plan (and therefore re-discuss, which is the whole point of coop games) allmost every turn. And unlike many other coops, it’s theme is not obstrusive, but again, unlike many other coops, it’s theme sticks around. Coops like Pandemic: The Cure often detoriate to pure puzzle solving where you don’t talk about your abilities or about epidemics anymore, but only about yellow or red cubes. With Forbidden Desert, the mechanics are nicely integrated with the theme in a way that keeps it alive, if only because it is still simpler to talk about the storm and the sand and the city instead of “tiles” or “number of tiles shifted”. The worst offender in this regard could be seen in Elder Sign, because it is very very simple to reduce it to just Yahtzee with boons and banes and totally ignoring the actual theme (my wife plays it that way and therefore never really had that much fun with it thematically, she just preferred it because it was a simple dice chucker without much need for deep thinking).

Start with this link: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1108855/back-basics-killer-deck-using-only-cards-single-co – it gives you a multi-sphere deck you can run solo against most of the core set quests and the Mirkwood cycle (actually holds up nicely in…

It’s just my favorite game that I actually get to play, so I guess if I ever find a more favorite game than LOTR:LCG (and actually get chances to play it regularily), I will change my flair.

Aside from all the other suggestions I can add that **VivaJava: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game** might have a stupid name, but is a fun dice filler and a nice take on yahtzee mechanics. If you want dice with some mire game attached you could go for **W…

My favorites is **Robots and Steampunks**, because robots. and steampunks. Well, and Steampunks draw cards like there is no tomorrow and protect stuff, so I can often get my robots going fast. But mostly it’s because of the robots and steampunks.

Well, I like it because of the group puzzle – coop games without a group puzzle to solve together are hard to like 😉 Saying: S:C might just not be a game for you, because the puzzle is the game.