Category Archives: Reviews

Board Game Jungle Looks at The Siblings Trouble

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Small World and a Small Look at Colonialism

In Small World players act as races that first extinguish lost indigenous tribes and then go after each other. Who are these lost tribes? Where are we coming from? I don’t know, but we’re all kinda pissed that we’re all here. OK, well, maybe not pissed, but certainly cranky and we all want our space, and your space, and their space. Why? Because the more spaces on controls the more points one gets and the player with the most points wins. This is colonialism.

You know what? I just tried typing the whole set-up and that was tedious. Let me link you to the rules and give you a basic idea of what you are doing instead. Also, look at this picture.

Small World Set Up

So, you will choose a race that has been paired with an ability. On your turn you place your corresponding tokens on regions, starting from the edge and make sure they are connected unless your ability says otherwise. at the end of your turn you collect money for the spaces you occupy. Simple enough. First though, there are Lost Tribe tokens you must battle. All that means is you use one more token from your army than you would have, same for areas with mountains. Other players will do the same, but look out! Players can come after your regions as well, thus depriving you of points and gaining points for themselves.

Agh! So frustrating. My Farming Humans can’t compete against the Bivouacking Ratmen. No problem. Put your race in decline. Go ahead. Do it. Now pick a new race with a new ability. See how you do. This is one of the things I enjoy about Small World. You are able to try different strategies with different races and abilities within one game. Maybe choosing the Amazons will allow you to rally and win the day after all.

There are also many expansions in case you get bored with all of the combinations that come with the core game. We currently only have the Grand Dames expansion. It was a must have as the Amazons are the only women represented in the core game.

Is this game fun? It is for me and my family, and for our few friends we have played it with. Are there concerns? Potentially. Let’s address them. You are displacing indigenous tribes. Yes, they are “Lost” and pretty faceless on the tokens in the game. It’s all to make you feel ok about pushing people out of their lands. All of the other players are doing the same thing, and then you may all go after each other. This is colonialism, but hey it IS an area control game. Should these things concern you? Maybe not. They didn’t concern me because it’s dwarves and giants and ratmen and ghouls. It’s a fantasy world. It did, however, concern a friend of mine and we had a great discussion about it being representative of the world at large and its history. It’s not a game she will want to play again anytime soon and I think that’s fine. I’m really glad that this game sparked this conversation and allowed us to talk about big issues. It’s not the goal of Small World. Small World just wants you to have fun. Small World just wants to pit you against your friends. Small World is just a game. But, then again, it is a game placed in our world, and in our world we have a lot of history of the displacement and destruction of indigenous people  and tribes, lost or not.

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Video

Board Game Jungle Looks At Monkeys Need Love Too

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Spaghetti & Meeples types about The Great Dalmuti

Behold! I am The Great Dalmuti! You can tell because I got rid of all my cards first. Bow down to me! Or at least stand up and move aside so I can sit in the chair designated for one as important and powerful as myself. Don’t know what I am talking about? Let me explain.

The Great Dalmuti is a rummy style game wherein players must create matched sets of cards and set them down. The first to get rid of all their cards wins and is declared, well, The Great Dalmuti. That is the basic premise, but there is much more to it than that. Everyone, you see, will be assigned a status or rank and that status or rank will affect not only where you sit, thus creating a physical representation of just how horrible your social status is, but also give you advantages or disadvantages.

The Great Dalmuti

Come with me as we venture into Status Symbol Land in order to learn more about how this game works on a Pleasant Valley Sunday…er, or Monday…because today is Monday, at least it is where I live….

Anyway! You already know how to become the Great, or rather Greater Dalmuti, then there is the Lesser Dalmuti. You may look down on the Lesser Dalmuti, but then you both may look down on, and laugh at, the Greater Peon and the Lesser Peon. All players between the Greater Peon and the Lesser Dalmuti are run of the mill citizens. Boring!! But also they aren’t taxed. Taxed?! Whatever do you mean Brandon? You see, at the beginning of each round there is taxation. This is where the Greater and Lesser Peons give there best (lowest numerical) card to the Greater and Lesser Dalmutis respectively. And the Dalmutis schluff their worst cards off onto the peons.

Then, as the Greater Dalmuti, you get to go first, thus setting the tone and furthering the oppression of the masses. Players lay down one or more cards of matched numbers and others lay down cards until no one can top any cards and the last person to lay down cards wins the hand and gets to go first on the next hand. For me this game is a great representation of a modern capitalist society despite its pseudo medieval theme. Sure, you can work your way up and become the Greater Peon and then the Lesser Dalmuti and then the Greater Dalmuti! But the cards are quite literally stacked against you.

My wife and I immediately fell in love with this game when some friends introduced it to us about twelve years ago. It was out of print at the time and we assumed it remained so, but then we saw it in Cloud Cap Games and had to snatch it up. The gameplay still held up, we still enjoyed it just as much, and we were able to introduce some new people to it. They had just a good a time as we did on our first play though. The Great Dalmuti Is a fun rummy game with a twist for 4-8 players where charcoal is burning everywhere and no one seems to care.

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Spaghetti & Meeples Types about Ticket To Ride

Who’s got a ticket to ride? This guy! And I’m loving it. I am a captain of industry, transport, and travel. In Ticket To Ride players attempt to complete different train routes to gain points. Players may opt to take additional route cards as the game continues. Longer routes equal more points. More routes equal more points. And hey, you can get points for the longest route!

TTR and 1910

A player’s choices are simple in Ticket to Ride; take train cards, take route cards, or play train cards and set your adorable little trains on your map and score points. You may only do one of these actions on your turn, so choose wisely.
Why do I like this game? It has a great look. It allows me to play with tiny trains. I can try different strategies every time. Most routes? Longest routes? Do I block my opponents or focus on my own game? I also like that even though it has many expansions I haven’t really felt the need to get any of them. It’s light fun every time, whether we’re playing with our whole family or with friends.
What I don’t like? When my opponents have analysis paralysis(AP). Hurry up! I want my turn! I have a plan! Oh no! You took the train card I wanted. You blocked my route! Ok, I actually like those other things. It makes the game fun. But not the AP. Never the AP.
We’ve had our copy of Ticket to Ride for a couple years and have only now gotten around to acquiring the 1910 expansion which adds full sized train cards (the originals are tiny. you will feel like a giant!) and new routes. The cards also have a great Americana look to them, if you’re into that kind of thing; which I am, occasionally.

If you are looking for a light game with a great look that’s fun for the whole family I definitely recommend Ticket To Ride.

I purchased my copy.

Ticket To Ride

Ticket To Ride 1910 Expansion

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Spaghetti & Meeples Looks At Leviathans

Leviathans! Leviathans offers an expansive, immersive experience. It’s 1910 and you are in a steampunk alternate universe where Rombaldi fluid makes these giant ships fly! Nope, sorry. Rynchowski. They’re not dragons, but the turrets on the ships move!!

You have your ship, or ships, and you have a card that corresponds to each ship that shows you all of the stuff you have on it and where that stuff is. Crew, guns, engines, Tesla coil things. You move around on these hex boards trying to blast each other out of the sky. You don’t have special cards, but there are tokens and dice in 6 colors and two shapes. D10 and D6!

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I have wanted this game for a long time. It’s steampunk. It’s these awesome miniatures. Did I mention the turrets move? And it has this incredible world of fiction surrounding it. It includes two stories in one book and The Gazeteer deepens your understanding of the world of Leviathans.

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Leviathans feels like it’s a game for people who play miniatures or war games. My family has Axis and Allies and Memoir ‘44. That’s about as tactical and war gamey as we get. Well, except for D&D Attack Wing…. Now, while Leviathans doesn’t have the resource management aspect that Axis and Allies does it feels like this is a war gamer’s war game. But I am saying this as an outsider and I am sure I am wrong. But I’m probably right.

This is a tactical game. Where is your enemy going to move? Where should you be? If you are in range to shoot the enemy, where will you be shooting them? Are you taking out their guns? Their engines? Are you exposing yourself to defeat?

Leviathans is a great game. And it is big. Both physically and figuratively. And I do like it. It’s an immersive world. It requires a fair amount of your time. And it’s an expensive world.

If you are looking for a flying type game and are on a budget I have to recommend any of the Attack Wing/X-Wing games. Starter sets can be as low as $30/35 American and adding additional vehicles or creatures can be as low as $11 or $15.

But if you want to spend more time against your opponent while wearing top hats and monocles, really getting into some serious strategy, and reveling in a rich and wonderful world you should save up and get Leviathans. Oh, and there are two expansions which means more ships!

Or maybe you should go ahead and get both and make them battle each other!

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Runeslinger has some great videos on gameplay and movement.

I purchased my copy of Leviathans

 

Leviathans Core Box Set

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A Look At Jetpack Unicorn and Poo

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We recently grabbed two games that we wound up really liking. Jetpack Unicorn and Poo! I will add that we bought these games mostly based on the box art. Yay graphic design!

Jetpack Unicorn is a card game for 3 or more players. Players take turns being the judge and ask questions about scenario cards. The non-judge players try to give the most interesting answers using transmog cards, which have specific words or phrases on them. The judge chooses the winner and that player gets the amount of points that are shown on their transmog cards.

Sounds easy. Except that it’s not that easy to figure out. The rules state that the judge asks anything about the scenario on the card, but the scenario card IS a question. What they mean is to ask any sort of clarifying question about the scenario, but that’s not easy to figure out from the way the instructions are written. We had to watch the online tutorial to figure that part out, and even then it seemed to me like they were playing a different game than the one we purchased.

Even with how frustrating it was figuring out how to play what is a simple game we did have fun once we figured it out, assuming we actually did figure it out. It is fun and silly and I would recommend it, but DO watch the online tutorial. Do a YouTube search for TeamHyperCube Jetpack Unicorn quickplay. Or just click here

I also feel it’s important to watch most of the videos from the Creators of Jetpack Unicorn. I not only got a much better feel for the game, but also got some great insights into the concept of the game beyond the basic mechanics. Here’s a video from the creative team explaining what they want to happen as you play the game. I’ve started it at :38 for you.

A game that was very easy to figure out and tons of fun right out of the box was Poo, a card game for 2-8 players. You are a monkey in a zoo and something in the food has made all the monkeys wacky and wild. You all start flinging poo at each other. The first player to get hit with and accumulate 15 poos loses. Our 6 year old, Finney, and I wound up playing 6 rounds at a go one morning. It’s tons of simple fun.
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Players are dealt a hand of five cards. On your turn you may then play one, Poo, Special Poo, Event, or Clean card or discard any number of cards and replace them from the stack. That’s it. All of the cards tell you what to do. But wait! Just because it’s your turn doesn’t mean you don’t get to defend yourself. There are Mishap cards. Maybe your opponent plays The Big One dealing 7 poo to you. Oh no! That’s a lot of poo and you already have 9 poo. You could lose the game. Unless of course you you have Slip. All of the poo is sent back to your opponent and there is nothing that can be done about it!

Clean cards allow you to clean poo off of yourself an occasionally shake it off onto your opponent. Event cards are interesting and add an unexpected layer of strategy to Poo. For example, let’s say you play the Keeper’s Got The Hose card. The card allows players to clean 1 poo off at the start of their turn. You can still keep flinging poo at each other and all it takes is one poo flung at the keeper to make him disappear. So what do you do? Do you take advantage of being able to clean one poo off every turn? Can you afford to let your opponent do the same? Will you miss your chance for victory by dispatching the Keeper?

Poo is a great game to play between other games, but also fun to just play round after round for an afternoon. For me, Jetpack Unicorn is fun, but is a game that we only bring out once in awhile.

Poo The Card Game

The World Needs A Jet Pack Unicorn

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You Should Be Watching Shut Up & Sit Down

UPDATE: SU&SD have made some announcements about being more productive and creative, and our collective heart  goes out to Matt Lees.

There are a lot of YouTube videos out there. A lot. Even narrowing it down to something as niche as board games, there are still a lot of videos. And YouTube Channels. Dice Tower, Spooning Meeples. And Vimeo Channels. Vimeo. Vimeo is where Shut Up & Sit Down lives. I was actually introduced to SU&SD via the Dice Tower Network. The first video I saw was their review of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. Here it is…

Review: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective from ShutUpShow on Vimeo.

That was enough to get me very interested. So I tracked them down on the Vimeo and watched a few minutes of many of their videos. This here looked like something. Something more. Something different. I went straight back to the very first video and worked my way forward in time. Paul Dean and Quintin “Quinns” Smith are very clever and engaging. Dean and Smith are the primary hosts but they are frequently joined by others who are just as witty and entertaining(Matt Lees and Brendan). They do skits and get outside. Yes, outside!

Shut Up & Sit Down, Season 2, Episode 3 from ShutUpShow on Vimeo.

Super cool! But, you want to see genius? Watch these next three videos in order. I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a great setup in the first video and then just an amazing payoff in the third. And the way they tie in their board game reviews in this set of three videos is inspired. Here, watch them and then continue reading.

The Halloween Special, 2013 from ShutUpShow on Vimeo.

 

Review: Seasons from ShutUpShow on Vimeo.

 

The Dexterity Games Special from ShutUpShow on Vimeo.

Please tell me you watched all of that. Ah! So cool! That right there made me a life long fan.

But…but, lately. OK, look. These guys are still very good. Better than most. Better than the best. And they have been able to turn SU&SD into a bonafide business. I love this and am so happy for them. But…well, they don’t seem to get out as often. They don’t travel through space and time as much. They don’t rhyme like they used to. Again, they are still really entertaining, and witty, and smart and fun. You should watch all of their videos. I’m assuming that with Shut Up & Sit Down becoming a business that they are having to meet with accountants and lawyers and such. I do hope they find time to get back to their roots. I hope that they find a way to get back outside more and maybe fit a song or two into future episodes. That being said you should watch this recent review of Zombie 15’. This is good stuff.

Review: Zombie 15′ from ShutUpShow on Vimeo.

 

And then when you are done with that please check out my youtube and subscribe. Thanks! 🙂

Update: Now at Spaghetti & Meeples

Oh, I also have a vimeo.

Update: Now at Spaghetti & Meeples

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7Wonders

What is it like to play 7Wonders? It’s awesome! Why is it awesome? Because the artwork is incredible. Because you get to “build” a wonder like Giza. Because of the awesome little money tokens. Because of the military tokens. Because it has multiple expansions that add to the game play and also work with each other. But mostly, because all of the players play every turn.

7Wonders

The basic rundown:

There are three sets of cards, each covering a different age, representing different developmental eras as you strive to build your wonder. The first age is mostly about acquiring resources to build your wonder and to build smaller structures that give you victory points. Age two is when you build even more smaller structures. Maybe you focus on science or military or get victory points by building the Pantheon. Age three is when you’d better be ready and have your wonder finished or close to finished. You also get to build guilds at this time. More victory points! You aren’t actually building, it’s cards. But you get the idea. You collect resource cards that you use to acquire other cards that will give you points.

This game takes strategy. You need to think about if you are taking a resource now will it pay off later, and if you pass on a resource you may never see it again. You know that the person you are passing your hand to is collecting certain things, but wait, it’s round two and now the cards are passed the other way. Were you paying attention to what the person on the right was collecting? Should you focus on collecting science cards? They gain points exponentially. Should you focus on he civic structures of the blue cards and see if you can pile on enough to get the most points? Maybe you should build your military as big as possible so as to take points away from adjacent players? So much to think about and so much to plan, but it is actually an easy game to get into.

Each player has a hand of cards. Each player then plays one card and passes their hand to another player. And this brings me to what I stated above: all of the players play every turn. This is great. Sure, sometimes one player may take longer than the others to figure out their move, but you all have cards and you are all making choices and it’s all happening at once. The recommended age group for 7Wonders is 10 and up, but we play this with our 6 year old as well as our 10 year old. He doesn’t get all of the strategy, but is still fun for him because there is no downtime. It’s one of the reasons we really like playing Dixit in our family too.

The Expansions!

The expansion sets!! I mentioned them above as well. 7Wonders: Leaders adds leader cards that players recruit prior to starting game play and they grant special abilities to help you gain resources or victory points. 7Wonders: Cities adds more guilds, new wonders, and a diplomacy mechanic that effects military conflict. The Wonder Pack adds four wonders: The Great Wall Of China, Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, and, my favorite, Manneken Pis. These expansions are also very reasonably priced.

The thing I want you to take away is that this is an easy game to learn. Even with all that is going on and all of the strategizing that is required. The gameplay is simple. Mastering it can take awhile, but it is always fun. We have spent nights just playing game after game because it is easy to access and challenging to get great at. Oh, and you can play with up to 7 players! Synergy! Well, here we are at the end of the review and I don’t have an exit strategy….

 

7Wonders

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Elder Sign

Our house is quiet most nights. After coming home from our daily activities we prepare our evening meal and sit at the table and talk about what happened to each of us during the course of our day. After the children are put to bed my wife and I read for awhile and then retire for the evening ourselves. Lately though, I wait until I hear her breathing change signaling she is asleep and I head back to the drawing room and retrieve the book I had discovered in the attic when I was searching for my father’s old coat. This aged tome is filled with incredible, fanciful tales that surely must be a fiction, yet they feel so real. They haunt my dreams.

A strange museum. It’s many rooms filled with unspeakable horrors. A revolving cast of four academics and adventurers struggling to save the world. The only weapon that can prevent the fall of humanity is a series of sigils collected in the right order using a set of six green dice…

…and sometimes a yellow or red die….or both…in addition to the original six, that is…

Elder Sign

Elder sign is one of my favorite games because it is based on the Cthulhu mythos(one of my favorite things) and it’s cooperative(another of my favorite things). It’s 1926 and curiosities in a museum are threatening to open a portal to another world and let one of eight Old Ones in to our world to destroy it.  You and up to 7(!) other players are investigators who must stop this great evil from getting through by searching the museum for enough “Elder Signs” to keep the portal from opening.

What that means is that on a turn a player must put their investigator token on a card that represents a room in the museum and roll the right combination of symbols on custom dice to unlock the card and get other, special, smaller cards (spells, items, allies) or elder signs! I mentioned it’s cooperative, which means everyone wins or everyone loses, but you can actively help one another. If a roll gives you just one die with the right symbol you may “focus” it and reroll the rest. If two investigators are in the same room then the other player may focus a die as well.

There is a lot here. As far as focusing dice or using the item, spell, or ally cards. Oh! And “mythos cards”! At midnight there is a mythos effect. You discover the effect by turning over the mythos card at midnight. Wait! There’s a clock and it advances three hours at the end of each players turn. And if you have fewer than eight players it’s midnight every 12 hours. There are monsters that clog up the room cards, and other world cards, and doom tokens, and clue tokens, and sanity tokens, and stamina tokens, and a red die and a yellow die you can add with the right cards and, and, and…if your investigator dies you can grab a new one and keep going. Links to rules are here

And I love it. I love the artwork, I love the cooperative play. I love the feel of the dice and the sound they make as they tumble down my dice tower. The feeling you get when you get three rooms in a row and 5 elder signs is incredible. These dice. These custom dice are great. Take a look.

These dice.

They give me much joy. They also give me much despair. This is one of the big drawbacks to Elder Sign for me. Yes, there are clue tokens and other specialty cards that can help combat bad rolls, even a few bad rolls, but sometimes the cards and the dice are after you and there is nothing you can do. Alternatively, and this is quite rare, you may get rolls that are too good and the game is won too easily. I would definitely say a series of bad rolls is more likely, but gratification is lessened in both cases. There have been nights when we have scrapped a game because it was clearly off to a bad start or played again because the first run was dissatisfying.

Set up is a little complicated, but after a few times you get the hang of it and once it’s all set up it is quite easy to play multiple games in a single evening. I have to admit that even with the drawback of potentially having bad rolls or easy rolls, I still love this game. I love that we cheer each other on when we get the right combination of dice and that we all deflate and prop each other up when the dice are trying to kill us. And I love these dice. These dice.

I haven’t played with more than four people, but I can’t say I would like to. That’s a lot of sitting around and waiting.

Thanks to Porkins for the dice tower design.

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Elder Sign

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