Recent Reviews
Here are some quick reviews of all the games I’ve been playing lately. I will periodically move these titles down to the full A-Z list found HERE. I am using the following Board Game Geek rating guide to give these a score on how much *I* like these games, but all this is just, like, my opinion, man:
- 10 – Outstanding – will always enjoy playing.
- 9 – Excellent – very much enjoy playing.
- 8 – Very good – enjoy playing and would suggest it.
- 7 – Good – usually willing to play.
- 6 – Ok – will play if in the mood.
- 5 – Mediocre – take it or leave it.
- 4 – Not so good – but could play again.
- 3 – Bad – likely won’t play this again.
- 2 – Very bad – won’t play ever again.
- 1 – Awful – defies game description.
With that in mind, here are the most recent games I’ve reviewed!
Adult Games
- Exit: The Game – The Forbidden Castle () –
- Android: Netrunner () –
- Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers () –
- Dragonwood (5) – Nice artwork and presentation, but the game is pretty basic as you collect sets/straights/flushes to roll dice to get victory points. Ostensibly a children’s game, but correctly mathing out your chances and number of dice needed is kind of hard for kids. Also, the helper cards “+2 to all flushes” are very powerful and can lead to a runaway leader if one player gets them all.
- Quixx – Decent roll and write game where you try to fill as many numbers from 2-12 as possible with the twist being that you can’t fill in numbers that you have skipped. There is potential here, but “locking down” a color is fairly luck heavy, and ridiculously overpowered, leading to final scores that are about as luck dependent as Yahtzee.
- Quodd Heroes () – On the surface, this seems to be a game about planning/programming out the best way to roll your cubic heroes (with each of the six faces having a different move to execute). In execution, you quickly get so many special powers, special cards, and special board elements that you don’t have to plan out how you are going to roll, but rather plan out the best route to take across the game board. Which, is still a fun puzzle, but the cards are so swingy that the co-op game basically comes down to whether or not you can get a broken combo in time to beat the turn limit, and the head to head (roborally) mode is won by the player who gets the broken combo first. Again though, the puzzles are fun enough, and the game looks so amazing, so I’m pretty forgiving of these flaws and always look forward to playing anyway.
- Quirky Circuits
- Warmachine: High Command
- Yahtzee
Children’s Games
- Tales and Games: The Pied Piper (5+) – Even though this is theoretically a “take that” game (a style I’d usually steer away from with kids), the theme of pushing a horde of rats in different directions around the table is evocative enough that I think most kids wouldn’t get too frustrated with a string of nasty plays. There is a fair amount of thinking ahead (hamstrung by luck of the draw), so I wouldn’t go too young on this one.