Two semi-regulars brought a game they’d recently acquired: Compounded. In the main playfield are sixteen chemical compound cards: ammonia, ozone, etc. Each turn, players draw some random elements, maybe do some trading, then place elements on cards in an effort to complete compounds and score cards for victory points. Each card scored also ( Read more... )

There’s a local game store Shaterri introduced me to when we randomly found ourselves in its area. He’d heard about it billing itself as a “gaming pub”. It’s bright, clean, has more floor space for playing than it does for product, and has a dozen flavors of ice cream and microbrews on tap. Checking their weekly schedule, I noticed they ran Fantasy ( Read more... )

This was a slow week. We only had three players.

Game One was Havok & Hijinx, a lightweight game that exists mainly as an excuse to put cute baby dragons on cards. Each turn, each player gets either a random treasure or event, then plays an action card from hand (say, to steal a treasure or make everyone select and pass one card to the left). Each ( Read more... )

I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls in my copious spare time. So far, I’m having a blast with it. It’s an action combat RPG released in 2011 by From Software, and was on Steam sale a couple weekends ago, probably to stoke interest in the sequel that had been released one month prior.

Dark Souls has a deserved reputation for being brutally hard ( Read more... )

Thinking ethical stances through to their logical generalizations leads to some weird places.

Last Thanksgiving, in a fit of nostalgia, the party’s hosts put up a YouTube video of some horrible educational claymation film from their childhood in the 70s. One viewer repeatedly chided the film for fat shaming in portraying a girl with an insatiable ( Read more... )

Given that A) Shaterri contributed to the Kickstarter fund for Paperback and B) another game designer friend of mine said he found it fun, I brought it to Game Night and played it with Orbus and Mufi. It’s essentially a word game version of Dominion. Rather than being able to play all your money cards plus one special action card, all cards have ( Read more... )

Don’t Starve went on sale on Steam, so I bought it. It’s a roguelike survival game with a mechanical emphasis on crafting tools and tech trees and a cartoony goth art style. It’s permadeath, of course, and not easy.

I finally got around to playing Quantum, which I bought back in early February but have had a huge delay in playing, partially ( Read more... )

Blizzard released Hearthstone on iOS last week. It’s pretty much pounded the last nail into SolForge’s coffin for me.

It’s an elegant game with several good points going for it. The overall mechanics are straightforward, and they’re introduced one by one in a detailed tutorial that has a ton of personality. There’s a great deal of tactical ( Read more... )

Last week, our usual game hosts were at a convention, so instead I dropped by a comic and games store run by friends-of-friends that was running a Saturday board game night. They already have a gaming night Thursday evenings, but a couple of regular customers wanted to experiment with an additional event on Saturday due to having work-related brain ( Read more... )

Game one was Seasons, with four players using the basic component set. It's a drafting-based game, though not so purely drafting as 7 Wonders. Players compete to achieve the highest combined value of crystals scored and cards played over the course of three four-season years. They also constantly collect and use elements, which are needed to pay ( Read more... )