Board Game Reviews

I really enjoy puzzle games where you can spend more time looking and thinking than actually manipulating pieces on the board. Tangrams are an old school example, as is the popular traffic management puzzle Rush Hour and all its variants. Jigsaw puzzles are also manipulation puzzles, though that’s all about finding the right piece, not a more strategic planning of piece movement order. In all cases, good gamers can plan a half-dozen or more moves ahead, and certainly anyone who…

First there was the blockbuster success Cards Against Humanity, then there were a zillion expansion card decks from the company, then expansion decks from a variety of other companies with names like Crabs Adjust Humidity, Cows Grilling Hamburgers, Clones Attack Hilarity, Cads Against Disney and Kids Against Maturity. Yes, they’re all real third party expansions for a rather crass card game that will simultaneously amuse and appall you. Often in the very same round. For those few of you who…

I have to admit, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with jigsaw puzzles. I enjoy when I can find a piece and place it in the puzzle, but I hate when I look and look and just can’t find the one I seek. Puzzlers know that “I think this is the one piece missing from the puzzle!” angst of doing a jigsaw puzzle, even as the other voice in your head assures you that all is well and…

From the outside it might look like the board gaming world is just a big melange of different ideas, concepts, and game settings, but it turns out there quite a few different well known categories and types of games. For example there are push your luck games, deck building games and worker placement games. I’ve played quite a few different types but I realize that I had never played what’s known as a “roll and write” game. Luckily, Adam’s Apple…

I imagine that most gamers have played chess at some point in their lives. It’s a complex game with millions of possible scenarios. It’s also complicated to learn because you have a variety of pieces and each has its own specific movement and attack patterns. A bishop can move one way, but a pawn is stuck plodding forward, unless there’s a piece to take, in which case it can jitter at an angle. Chess is also what I call a…

Let me just start out by saying that it’s rare I acquire a game and immediately fall in love with it, but Sprawlopolis is just that sort of game. It’s a card game without any tokens, chits, scoreboards, inserts, folding boards, miniatures or dice. You know, all the accoutrements of modern board game design that require big boxes and a substantial price tag. Sprawlopolis is representative of a different class of game known in the biz as “mint tin” titles.…

The life of a mercenary soldier in medieval times might have been harsh and tough, but even before the publication of Le Morte d’Arthur in 1485 the mythos of knights in shining armor has been a part of our culture. You know what I mean, the noble King Arthur, his lovely Queen Guinevere, the Knights of the Round Table, Sir Gawain, Sir Galahad, the evil Morgan le Fay, the kingdom of Camelot, and on and on. These courtly armored knights…

Classic board games took up about three square feet of table space. Think LIFE, or Monopoly. Card games? Generally quite a bit less, unless it involved laying out sets or building chains (e.g., Rummy or Solitaire). But modern games have become bigger and bigger affairs, and a monster like Massive Darkness or even Shadows Over Camelot can end up requiring a sizeable play surface, possibly bigger than your current dining table! If you follow me on Instagram – d1taylor –…

You’re ready, you have weapons, expertise, supplies, a few magical keys and hopefully luck on your side. But do you really dare to enter the Forgotten Depths and explore a monster-infested dungeon while seeking both treasure and the staircase out? I had a chance to review a late prototype of the 1-3 player co-op dungeon crawler game Forgotten Depths from Void Knight Games and here’s how it went… First off, there’s a lot of setup for this game. In fact the…

It was in the late 1970’s that a curious series of paperback books hit the shelf and completely changed how people thought of adventure stories. These stories didn’t need to be consumed in a linear fashion, heck you didn’t even need to read every page in the book. Instead, you were presented with a sequence of decisions at certain points and turned to page X or page Y based on your choice. Attack the monster? Go to page 11. Run…