Category: Syndicated

actually the saga expansions build a campaign and the boons and banes are character development in the widest sense. And you can rebuild your deck – within limits – in the saga expansion campaign, to get more development of your party. So it definitely…

**Waggle Dance** – received, played, loved, is one of the favorites of our weekly game group. **Assault on Doomrock** – received, played, still like the idea, but the implementation itself is just something that drives me up the wall. Not the games fault, it’s just not the game for me. **Lord of the Ice Garden** – received, only one solo play so far, but liked what I seen and will get it out for some brainy solo play again. Might even hit the table multiplayer, allthough it probably will be a monster to teach. **One Zero One** – neat little filler with a fresh theme and some fun twists. Doesn’t hit the table often, because it needs the right opponent to enjoy the “8 bit basic computer” feel. **Pocket Imperium** – felt meh with 2, might be better at 3+, but haven’t played it since that 2-player game. **Oddball Aeronauts** – received it, but somehow they forgot to send a game and only sent cards 😉 (to me it’s a quite elaborate rock-paper-scissors with admittedly cute graphics, but well, not really a a game). **Athlas: Duel of Divinity** – why the heck did I even back it? I don’t think I will ever be able to get it to the table. Cool minis, really interesting game with deck/army building and a good deal of miniature game in it, but with the theme and the fact it is only 2 player, it was a rather dumb move to back it. It’s probably the same reason why I bought The Duke – I love games I classify as “configureable chess”. The ones I look forward to the most currently are **Apocrypha** and **Scythe**. Some other stuff in the pipeline to be delivered this year, but those two are the big ones I really look forward. For quite a few games I just didn’t back, waiting for either the german Spieleschmiede Project (some of the above – like Lord of the Ice Garden – were Spieleschmiede Projects) or actually waiting for retail (allthough I feel dumb that I got The Gallerist at retail price instead of the much cheaper Spieleschmiede price … oh well, live and learn).

Not really important to me, because many of them are thematic games in the Fantasy or SciFi or Horror genre and that just doesn’t appeal at all to my wife, who is my prime gaming partner. I do care about top “euro realistic theme” games, but even then only so far as to read up on them to see if they would work for us (or if they have a cool solo variant so that they could work for me). But I am quite selective about what goes into my collection.

by TheGargoyle
Probably The Lord of the Ice Garden is the most euro’ish game that I really like to play solo. The solo rules make sense and due to the asymmetric winning goals of the different factions, each combination plays differently.

by TheGargoyle
A thematic reason for number 9: you did the main work, but often loose ends have to be tied up and stuff has to be finished, so you leave your assistant to that. The kickout action then is just that someone else does a deal or some bu…

Well, I would say that Robinson Crusoe is much closer Dead of Winter (minus the traitor) than it is close to Pandemic. Dead of Winter has you scavenging locations, Robinson Crusoe has you exploring locations and going there collecting (or trying to col…

no idea, I just missed the last print run of Navajo Wars myself, thats all 😉

look out for **Comancheria**, another P500 for a new game that uses the Navajo Wars engine and will go to print early 2016 it seems. Navajo Wars just had its 2nd printing sell out, so I doubt it will go up to 500 that soon.

Dice games. I roll Will Wheaton results most of the time.

Not a racing game, but has dice you roll and then assign as workers: **Waggle Dance**. You manage a bee hive and the dice are your worker bees. Lots of fun with that game, turns are quick and its easy to teach. Not as much interaction ïn it as in a racing game, of course.

by TheGargoyle
Well, the german version is available at Spieleschmiede 🙂 (hoping for my package to arrive before the weekend). Since the game is language neutral, you can buy any language version and just download the rules in your favorite languag…

That is what you need the telescope for – preventing to run into monsters. Or the Raven from the character extension.

You sure you don’t mix it up between Legends of Andor (what the OP talks about) and Darkest Night (what your description sounds like)? There aren’t too many random monster spawns, most of them are spawned by legend cards and are static. And there are n…

There is no need for constantly rolling 5 and 6 – allthough of course it helps if you do 😉 (which makes the mage so powerful with a guaranteed 4 on his die). But the gist of the game is exactly the struggle of managing your limited (and diminishing!) …

My favorite board at the moment is the one from **Lord of the Ice Garden** – it just is beatiful work. Might look a bit busy on first look, but after the first play it makes sense and it is just great to look at – but the rest of the componemts are gre…

It is one of my favorites, too. I like how it works with the theme so well.

oh $deity. just think about him rambling on about what combination to start with :O

Ths is our choice, too. make the piles in the box top, collect the im tne trays per player in the insert and you don’t need much place. And you can easily stop and continue after eating, a single round goes fast enough, so you don’t end up with half a …

Well, Innovation is a typical Chudyk design – each and every card is crazy unbalanced and you constantly can (and will) screw over another player. I can imagine it being only moderately chaotic with two but more than that and you are in the land of cra…

and it doesn’t have random crazy illogic card powers thrown in and technologues actually build on each other as cost reduction and it has actual building costs. So, well, it is totally different from Innovation aside from the “tableau builder with ha dmanagement with tech dev as theme” 😉 Really, they play out very different. One goes well with a glas of wine, sitting in tne reclaining chair, philosophing about the world – the other is throwing each other cards into the face, hectically screaming and flipping the table at the end. 😉

oh yes, this one played itself uo into the heart of me and my wife very fast. I was astonished she likes it that muchm because it us on the heavier end of the spectrum if games we play, but she really enjoys it. The theme works great and it looks good …

**Progress: Evolution of Technology** currently is one that gets quite a few plays with my wife. We both love that it has a rather logic structure with regards to the technologies you can develop and it looks really great. Of the bigger, more complex g…

I am currently a backer, because I like those old choose your own adventure stuff and this adds a spatial and graphical aspect to it. And I am a solo gamer, so this thing is perfect. Only thing that could make me drop out would be spieleschmiede announ…

Printerstudio has them. Double the price of standard cards, though.

yeah, sorry, butchered the joke by getting the name wrong 😉

**The Duke** or **The Jarl** could be an option. Ok, the board itself is just cardboard, but then – it’s a simple thing. The tiles themselves are wood (Duke) or plastic (Jarl). Both very interesting abstracts with interesting twists. Another option would – of course – be dice games like **Dungeon Dice**. All dice, nothing else. Even engraved dice. **Pandemic: The Cure** was an interesting one that could fit, too. Most components are dice, but the main “board” are a few coasters of heavy cardstock and a plastic ring. The player mats themselves are cards, but you never shuffle them (except if you deal them random and that’s just once at setup) and they are not many, so you could even sleeve them in real sleeves without going bankrupt 😉 Oh, and another option is to get some PnP card games and just print them on 100% plastic cards. I did that for my retheme of cypher, to get something I happily play at the pub without worrying at all about anything spilling over the cards, since if the worst happens, I can just clean them.

I have Tiny Epic Kingdom and really enjoyed it when I played it, but sadly my wife doesn’t liked it that much when we played. So it is sitting on the shelf, waiting for a replay when she has forgotten that she didn’t like it last time 😉 Still waiting …

Aside from the already mentioned **Valley of the Kings**, how about **San Juan**? Can be packed up quite tight if you ditch the official box and put it in a deckbox. **Race for the Galaxy** is great, too, if you just grab the base game and maybe one ex…

this is a long time (well, ever since the german version released last Spiel in Essen 😉 ) favorite of mine. It plays great, is super compact and lots of fun. Theme is pasted on, but hey, who cares, it’s a compact deck builder with crazy comborific car…

**Waggle Dance** has you manage a beehive by sending bees (dice) out to work (cards with dice symbols) and collect nectar (ressources) to ultimately make honey. Very cute graphics and it’s a hoot to play. In **Karnival Koala** we live in a post-eucalyp…