Today I’m upping the ante with my recent dive into wargaming. Putting on my big boy trousers and stepping up to ‘hex and counter’ games. My first foray proper into this world is with Salerno ’43, a game from GMT Games and designer Mark Simonitch.
I’ve had a look through the lists of games being released at Essen and picked my top 10. There are some on here you’d expect, and maybe one or two you wouldn’t.
For such a simple action set to choose from, and with only three roles available in the entire game, Oath has no right to tickle your brain in the way it does.
As Eddie Izzard once said, over here in Europe we’ve got tons of castles. So many, that we’ve all got one each.
Agriculture and board games make good bedfellows. There’s something very satisfying about taking a patch of land and watching your little business or farm grow.
With a name like Unlucky Adventurers, you might be wondering if it’s a game of complete luck. The answer is a bit of yes, and a bit of no.
Poleis is a war game, but not one with a ton of cardboard chits, or worrying about attack and defence values. In fact, it looks and feels more like a Euro game
Cubitos is a racing game from John D. Clair (Dead Reckoning, Mystic Vale, Space Base) and Alderac, which mixes frenetic jockeying for position with bag-building.
It makes me enormously happy – smug, almost – to say that Klask isn’t just good in the context of “for a poor man’s crokinole”. It’s just brilliant.
Designer extraordinaire – Reiner Knizia – created this deck-building game of exploration and adventure. Does it scratch that mosquito bite yearning for jungle escapades?
