Board game reviews and previews
Board game reviews and previews
Spooky is a great word. It conjures up images of ghosts, ghouls, monsters and horror, but does it through the lens of something safe and fun. It's kid-friendly, it's all things Scooby-Doo, and it's one of my favourite feelings. Vast: The Mysterious Manor aims to recreate that feeling in the poster child for all things spooky - a haunted mansion.
the moment. We're seeing more and more Personalities being employed by board game publishers to act as marketing co-ordinators, social media gurus, or any one of a load more nondescript fluffy job titles.
Complete challenges, earn points, laugh, and get to know your guests a bit better. Let me tell you, when you play Final Challenge, you're going to know everyone around the room a lot better than when you started.
Arkosa, the new title from Toon Hammer, plonks you on the titular planet of Arkosa, and makes you try to get back off of it. You see, there's an opportunity to get off this desert world, but only the most prestigious of colonies gets the ticket.
If you yearn to recreate the thrill of cubicle life of a brown-nosing office minion, then I have the game for you! Welcome To Sysifus Corp, from designer Wonmin Lee, is a highly interactive game, which sees the players take the roles of employees at the eponymous Sysifus Corp, in a cat-and-mouse race to be the first to their performance review.
Chip Theory Games, who make Too Many Bones, have a reputation for putting premium games with massive replayability out in the market. Was the hype justified? And maybe more importantly for my readers - is it a good game to get, even if you're a die-hard Euro gamer? Can you still have fun without farming or running a fishery?
Jonny Pac is the cowboy-hat-wearing designer of Coloma, Sierra West, and one of this year's big hits, Merchants Cove. He's also the developer on the current Dranda Games Kickstarter, Solar Sphere. Here's what he had to say.
As you might have guessed, Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition is a game in the same family as the original board game, Terraforming Mars. This latest game gives itself the label of "The Terraforming Mars Card Game", which is a bit of a misnomer if you ask me, because it's no more of a card game than the original game was.
When I first saw the name 'Subastral', I immediately thought "Cool, definitely a space game". I was wrong. Subastral in this context refers to exactly what it describes - below the stars. The focus is our own blue marble, our own speck of beauty on the canvas of cosmic insignificance: planet Earth.
Did you wake up today, and suddenly have the urge to run a railway in the Philippines? No? What if I told you the railways are on Luzon, the largest and most-populous of the Philippine islands? Yeah, I knew it, I knew that'd swing it for you.