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With summer drawing to a close, August has been a great gaming month for our bloggers! From Living Card Games to collaborative board game staples, take a peek into the gaming cupboards of our bloggers and find out what they couldn't put down.
Joe Packham
So, the new Stonemaier game dropped in August! Pendulum has been such an interesting experience for me and something of a roller-coaster ride. As an avid Stonemaier fan, I was mega excited for their sole new game of 2020. The fantasy theme and real-time USP, however, immediately cooled my excitement. Unexpectedly, I received a review copy of the game which forced me to attempt to set aside my own bias and form an honest and fair opinion. Man, that is so hard with a release like this!
After an underwhelming first game, which left me disappointed with the lack of thematic engagement and bland action selection, I can honestly say that I’m enjoying it more with each play. Getting familiar with the nuts and bolts of the mechanics has raised my engagement with it and allowed me to appreciate the time resource aspect more. Pendulum won’t be my favourite game of 2020, but it may well be the most interesting one to review!
Godspeed also graced my table in August. Now, this one I really did find thematically engaging! The alternate history space race theme is very fun and well executed with each player controlling a national or international space agency. The game boasts tight and clever worker placement with each worker having their own specialisation. It also has competitive track advancement, a bidding phase and joint event management. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable experience!
Finally, August was the month I got to play Star Trek Ascendancy! This 4X game has been around in my game group for a while now and at last I had the honour of guiding the Klingons to victory! If playing a 4 player board game that takes 5 hours wasn’t geeky enough, the Star Trek theme could make the nerdiest of nerds blush. Evidently, I’m nerdier than the nerdiest nerd because I had a grand old time. Live long and play more games!
Sarah Carpenter
August was a great month for gaming. My husband and I seemed to have quite a few quiet weekends where we played a lot of our old favourites, as well as a couple of new games.
At the moment, we are mainly playing games just the two of us, but we had a fun gaming Sunday with my husband’s daughter. We started with Everdell and included the Pearlbrook Expansion. I was the only one to really use the pearls, and they did lead to big points for me. Then she chose Catan, which was great fun as we haven’t played it for a long time (I guess some of the classics get a little overlooked these days). My husband shocked us by announcing his victory with a secret victory point development card! We finished with Reykholt, as we were tight on time but my husband’s daughter was keen to try more worker placement games. Needless to say, she stormed ahead on the tourism track and left us both behind!
I love gaming at the weekends because we can play some longer games and really get into them. Over the last couple of weekends, we have played Alubari: A Nice Cup of Tea, Isle of Skye with the Druids Expansion and Viticulture Essential Edition, which are all firm favourites. We also played El Dorado with the moderate Serpentine path. This was a great game and very tight as we both reached El Dorado, but I just snatched a victory on the tie breaker.
One of my favourite gaming experiences of August was My City. We played through the first chapter (three episodes) and, although I lost all three, I’m really looking forward to opening the next envelope and playing the next chapter (with hopefully more success!)
Nathan Coombs
Have you even had that experience when you turn up late to a party? You couldn’t be bothered to go or you thought it would be a bit dull. However, you are persuaded to go and, having walked through the door, you wish you had been there earlier. That’s how I’ve been feeling about Wingspan. Yes, I know it seems as though everyone has been at the Wingspan party for ages.
This Stonemaier game has taken the world by storm over the last twelve months, and I have managed to resist the urge to jump on the bandwagon – that is until my son won a lovely wooden dice tower complete with headbutting woodpecker. I felt I had to get the game, just to see if the hype was justified.
These summer months we have played Wingspan many times as a two, three or four player game. I would describe it as a gentle engine builder with lovely artwork. It has become a real hit with the family. Every turn, there are decisions about which habitats to stock, food to acquire or birds to attract. It seems there are many avenues to explore in trying to win. There is no vindictiveness and although there is an element of luck depending on the cards drawn, you do not feel cheated. Most games are of the right length, about 45-55 minutes.
Now that I’ve joined the Wingspan “crowd” I’m glad I arrived (albeit late). Now my wife wants me to order the European Bird Expansion as soon as possible. It looks like this party is set to run for quite a while longer!
Carl Yaxley
Throughout the month of August, I managed to squeeze a surprising amount of gaming in! Following a play of Stone Age at the end of July, we got Seikatsu, Santorini, and Star Realms to the table. Followed by Seven Dragons, Ships, and Star Wars: Outer Rim. I did start to wonder if my gaming was an episode of Sesame Street, brought to me by the letter S! We brought that trend to an end when Architects of the West Kingdom, Nusfjord, and Coimbra all hit the table.
Gaming highlights include trying new (for 2020) games in August: Celtic and Ride the Rails. The latter being the follow up to Irish Gauge, the second of Capstone Games Iron Rails series.
Ride the Rails was an immediate hit for me. Simply put, it's great. The game is played over a fixed number of rounds. Each round you can gain a share in a railway, then lay locomotives for a railway in which you own a share. You then send a passenger on a journey, and score depending on the number of links travelled, and how many shares you have in the appropriate railway. Gameplay is simple, but you've plenty to consider on your turn. Ride the Rails is an efficient, straightforward strategy game I would highly recommend.
Celtic is light pick-up-and-deliver, point-to-point movement game, with an element of set collection. Thematically, you control a family that's part of a larger tribe. The aim is to move family members to certain areas of the board, to score objectives. This element feels reminiscent of scoring destinations in Ticket to Ride. The mechanic that is particularly interesting is movement. Whenever you move, any opponent on the same space may follow you, which presents you with some interesting decisions. It makes Celtic a surprising strategic game.
Scott Binnie
It’s been a Living Card Game month here on the east coast of Scotland. There’s been an awful lot of Marvel Champions played in my house in August, much like there has since I got my hands on this incredible game and all of its excellent expansions. The arrival of the Hulk expansion was a welcome one and I’ve been enjoying playing around with how to make the big green fella work efficiently. My wife and I had great fun with a face-smashing duo of Hulk and Thor over one weekend in particular. With the release of the Red Skull campaign expansion this week, I’m sure there’s going to be plenty more Marvel action on our table.
I’ve also been rather click-happy and massively reinforced my Lord of the Rings LCG collection the last wee while. (Don’t tell my wife how much I spent… please.) Even more than with Marvel Champions, the deck-building aspect to LOTR is just incredible to me. You get an idea of how a card will work combined with another and before you realise it, you’ve got your poorly-thought-out storage solution all over the living room while your pet rabbit goes after your collection. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. We’re working our way through the quests in release order - many of which we’ve played before - and it’s been great fun so far. I’m enjoying a tactics-lore deck with hobbits and eagles, while my better half is rocking leadership-spirit with Aragorn, Arwen and Eowyn.
It’s not all co-operative though and, as in every good marriage, there’s been a competitive edge to our gaming this month. After getting snagged by the excellent Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle: Defence Against the Dark Arts review last month, we’ve been having great fun slinging spells at one another in the duelling club. There’s something spectacular about casting Stupefy on your spouse that just speaks to me, I don’t know what it is…
John Hunt
School holidays, so plenty played this month, mostly with my daughter. Some regular favourites have hit the table, such as Res Arcana, with its taught engine building from the smallest of drafted decks. Vanilla Kingdomino was abandoned in favour of a full extravaganza of Queendomino and Age of Giants: the satisfying core of tile laying from the base game with some additional crunch and a bit of take that. Much fun, but I like it all the more as it doesn’t put me off the simple purity of the original. Junk Art has continued to deliver enormous hilarity with its fabulous dexterity challenges, quick, varied turns and beautiful production: here style is substance. More dex-based gaming with the much-overlooked Flick Up Dead of Winter, which I think improves on the original through collaborative play and the genius of a zombie tower for ‘AI' movement.
The list goes on as Bargain Quest has hit the table again. Love the combination of drafting, card play and light economics with super fun theme and beautiful design. Tiny Epic Galaxies has been much enjoyed with its mini 4x antics and great use of a ‘follow action' mechanic which encourages some shrewd tactical play.
I played Hive for the first time against a very smart friend of mine. Has anyone else had a game of Hive last two nail-biting hours? I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and will definitely be playing again. And another first timer: Omen a Reign of War. Wow! Why have I not seen this sooner? A head to head 2 player card game, fighting over three Classical cities. Tense, taught, tactical. Quick to learn, teach and play, but every turn brings some really crunchy decision making. There’s a bit of luck, and tactics can top strategy as enemy combos leave you reeling, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable clash! What a great month!