The undisputed king of all online Board gaming Stuff. Its a huge, ugly and confusing mess to anyone who enters it for the first time, but once you’ve found your bearings the amount of information and resources available is incredible.
Tom Vassel has been the #1 reviewer of Board games for the last 10 years. Love him or hate him, he is prolific, with almost 2 games reviewed a day. He also has a podcast to go with it for those who like their gaming updates given to them aurally.
Pretty much does what it says on the tin. A guy will explain the rules to you and play some of the game to give you an idea if its something you would like to buy.
This is basically an industry only trade show in Las Vegas. A bunch of networking and stuff happens, but we don’t care about that, just show me the games…
7 Wonders: Duel, A two player version of the game, very little info has been released about the game other than it involves tiles instead of cards and will be out later in the year.
Munchkin – The Nightmare Before Christmas, people love Munchkin and they love TNBC, it will be a mega hit I’m sure.
Fantasy Flight have had their licence extended to include the new Star Wars films, so future expansions of their games will include ships from the new JJ Abrams movies.
Warhammer 40K Forbidden Stars is their new mega game. Usual mini’s, 3 hour game play, with a combat system that borrows a couple of ideas from the one they used in their Starcraft game with a lot of knobs and bells added. Early reviews are very positive (if you are into 3 hour FF games).
IDW will be releasing a bunch of Godfather games
The first game will be a deductive party card game, similar to Werewolf or Mafia, due in August.
The second game will be an area control game.
Chopstick Dexterity MegaChallenge 3000 has been on its way for what seems forever, but finally should be out very soon. Its pretty much what it looks like, chopsticks flying everywhere trying to grab stuff from a bowl. Looks like IBGC gold to me 🙂
Snow tails is to be re-released. Its the best racing game ever IMO (see previous review)
Pingo Pingo looks very interesting. It has has you running away from bear-riding penguins and consulting monkey sorcerers while collecting treasures. It comes with a 15 minute soundtrack and a gun that fires suction cup bullets…B.O.O.M! (finishes post, drops computer and leaves the room, you know like cool people do when they do cool things).
IBGC is a ‘bang on’place for a first date. Sitting there trying to make constant conversation for fear of looking boring can heighten the stress levels on a date. With a game between the two of you, you have something to talk around and about. Picking the right game can be a bit tricky though, so here’s some help to stop you #$%@ing up the first date with your dream girl by trying to get her to play Agricola…
Here are some general rules to follow:
Don’t make it too ‘thinky’. First off, thinking means you are not talking. Talking is generally good on a first date. Also, if strategy isn’t your thing and you get hammered, you’ll feel stupid. Feeling or making someone feel stupid is also bad.
Games should be a reasonable length of time. 20-30 mins is a nice amount of time. Chatting around that usually extends the game anyway.
Try and make sure they are fun. If you have fun with someone, you’ll probably want to see them again.
Make sure they are simple to learn as well. Explaining rules to someone for 20 minutes is not traditionally what you would call a conversation.
Ask us to help you if your not sure, we don’t play tonnes of games to find the perfect one for you for fun you know (OK we do, but we try and make it seem like work)
So here are few good IBGC approved first date games:
Jenga/Riff Raff – Fun, simple and silly. Jenga is a classic, and if you want something different ask us to show you Riff Raff.
Patchwork – Easy to learn and fun to play. You are making a patchwork quilt, there is some strategy to the game, but its non-confrontational and at the end of the game you’ll have a lovely quilt in front of you (plus you get to say ‘buttons’ a lot).
Word on the Street – Word games are always a good call. Its a concept we all get and this tug of war style game is great as the questions are easy and the time constraint means Scrabble players don’t have 5 mins to think of amazing answers.
Forbidden Desert – Co-operative games are great as you win and lose together (celebratory hug or consolitary hug, win/win situation baby). Just don’t start being bossy and telling the other player what to do, or tutting if they do something you wouldn’t have…
Cardline/Timeline – Super easy to learn and fun to play. If you both know history do timeline, if not go with Cardline. Do you know how heavy a Panda is? That’s OK, so long as you know they are heavier than a Rabbit, you’ll be fine.
You’ve played the video game right? Great, I haven’t, in fact I had never heard of it till the board game was announced to confused and angry cries of horror at the integration of an electronic app with a board game.
This review therefore will be purely about the game, with no comment about ‘it being rubbish because the video game does this and why doesn’t the board game do that.
Its a co-operative game set in the future with a hoard of aliens trying to mash us humans upside the head, while we valiantly try to hold them off with our puny guns and fighter jets.
You win if you fight them off and lose if two continents fall into utter chaos or your headquarters gets overrun.
These people have lost…by a lot.
There are 4 roles that need to be filled, with each person taking responsibility for a specific role in the defense of mankind (scientist, army dude, fighter pilot bloke and the boss man in charge). The game is broken up into a series of rounds, which are themselves broken into two parts:
Real time planning
Resolution of those plans
The real time planning is where the app comes into its own. The events that happen are always the same but the order in which you must plan for them will change every time. For example, you may be asked to allocate your fighters to defend the different continents, but wont have received reports of exactly how many spaceships will be there, so an educated guess has to be made, under time constraints. Yes there is timer going that gives you a limited amount of time to make each decision before it moves onto the next phase.
Those decisions are then resolved one at a time in a set order using a unique mechanism. In order to defeat/complete an objective a certain number of ‘hits’ must occur using a set of dice . If you make it on one roll, well done, if not…well you can try again, but you are also rolling an 8 sided die in conjunction with those hit dice. There is a fail track that starts at one. Every time you don’t make the objective it goes up by one and if that 8-sided dice rolls equal or less than that fail track, well, you can guess what happens. You fail, plus lose all the units involved on that objective. That really sucks, because it costs you money to get them back and then more money to place them on the missions. Oh, money is also crazy tight, you can overspend but then for every extra $$S you use it sends continents into further chaos, but any cash you don’t or can’t use is lost for the round (sounds like city council spending).
Great role, unless it was the second attempt…in which case they lost all their units.
The scientist can develop upgrades to help make life easier, but if you spend your budget on that, you aren’t defending the planet. Life kinda blows during an alien invasion.
There is a fair amount more to this game, but this is usually the point I get bored reading a review, so I’ll stop as you get most of the gist.
When we played on easy, we lost miserably, but in hindsight we saw a lot of things we would have done differently. The app is pretty awesome and is also the rulebook. The only thing the game comes with is a set up diagram. Then you just follow the app step by step while playing the game to learn how it goes, which is pretty groovy.
The first game will go pretty long, as you are learning the rules, but I can see games taking about 60-90 mins once you get it down. It plays well as a 1 player, as you just take all 4 roles. It would work well as a 2 and 4 player as well. The weak spot is 3 player, where one person has to take 2 roles and can kind of slow the game a touch.
You are definitely at the mercy of some dice roles and if spending a quarter your budget on one mission only to role a 1 and lose all your units is likely to drive you bonkers, this ain’t for you. If you are looking for a game with a strong theme and story arc with some great new ideas, this will be a hit.
Let’s hope Wil Smith is driving one of those bad boys…
You came into the cafe and you voted and these are your bestest games ever*:
Settlers of Catan
Cards Against Humanity
Dominion
Splendor
Agricola
Ticket To Ride
King of Tokyo
Concept
Race for the Galaxy
Camel Up
Scattegories
Dixit
Munchkin
Anomia
Netrunner
Wow, TTR at 6th, very surprised about that, I thought it would have been battling for the #1 spot. The top two were streets ahead of the rest in votes cast, with 3-7 very close in votes.
*TTR and TTR Europe, King of NY and Tokyo, were merged into one vote set.
