It is safe to say that Uwe Rosenberg’s classic game, Bohnanza, is the best-selling and highest-rating board game about bean-farming. It is a bona fide classic and remains a high watermark of game design innovation, for it dares to create something that never existed before.
The mark of good board game art is how often you find yourself distracted during a game by the artwork. When you find yourself captivated by the intricate work of the brush, shade and pattern and colour combining; when the art beguiles such that you forget that it is your turn; when that clever strategy […]
Railroad Ink, by Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva, is a peaceful, puzzly roll-and-write game. You roll dice and use them to build a network of rail and roads, trying to connect the most end-points, fill the centre squares, and make as few mistakes and dead-ends as possible. Like many roll-and-write games, there is no direct […]
Coup is a devious little bluffing game for a medium-size group. Each player has two secret cards who could be any of 5 different characters, each of whom allows you to perform one or more special actions. These cards double as lives. There are two caveats: 1) you can pretend to hold any character and […]
There are many roll-and-write games that came out over the last few years (this article has a useful graph), but Qwinto, by Uwe Rapp and Bernhard Lach , is one of the purest examples of a good quick roll and write. You roll dice and enter numbers into a grid given certain constraints, and score […]
The delightful Jordan Draper sent me this in the mail earlier this week: Tokyo Metro. It was such a delight to unbox that I wanted to share some photos with you before I even get a chance to play it.
Everyone needs a good party-game which involves you ruthlessly lying and backstabbing your friends. Here’s the why and the how of playing Resistance. Sure, you could play Secret Hitler or One Night Ultimate Werewolf, or Coup, or Battlestar Galactica. (You should not play Mafia, or Werewolf, for reasons.) But there is no other game with the purity, the intensity, the logic and the tactics of Resistance. My […]
“At long last… it’s over.” We’ve torn up all the cards in the world. The game is finished. We saved the world, although it was a close-run thing. My wife, always environmentally conscious, suggests putting the empty box and the torn-up cardboards in the recycling. But that would be like burning baby photos. This game, […]
Auction games make you question everything. Auctions make for great games.
High Society is one of the greatest auction game ever made.
My wife and I have been saving the world for 2 months, 1 week and 5 days. We should be watching The Good Place. Instead we’re playing Pandemic Legacy again, trying to stop the world from being torn asunder. Because the pull from Pandemic Legacy is better than the best show on Netflix. In our alternate timeline, it is September. […]
