The Thrust of the Matter

March has been a busy month and April is going to be moreso between birthdays (mine!), speech competitions, and basketball tournaments. But, right here at the beginning of the month, I was able to sit down with my game co-designer, Aaron, and play with our game. We have the first mission basically complete, just need to finish some balancing and still working on the XP system.

Good Reef

You may get some deja vu reading this, because yet again I played a game of Kingdomino with my friend Brennan while hanging out with his whole family. It's only because we really like each other and the game is colourful enough that it distracts the children from ruining it for us while we try and play. I won again, but this time it was much closer. Maybe I should stop playing with him so he doesn't beat me.

In the evening, my ex-student teacher (not because I didn't pass him, but because he DID pass and is now a real teacher) came over to play games. At the end of his practicum with me, after my marks were already in, he bought me a copy of Clank! Now, a year and a half later, I have all the expansions and we finally got a chance to play! We tackled the Dwarven Mine together and he beat me good. I'm not sure what went wrong. Maybe he stole some artifacts while I was taking the dog out? That would make the most sense.

What I enjoyed about playing this multiplayer as opposed to solo was the race to get the most gold deposits mined. This is one area that I succeeded at, and so I got a bonus 20 points to Shane's 10. That kept the game a little bit closer. I can see how in a 3 or 4 player game this can really turn into a race to get to the gold deposits before others do.

After Clank!, Shane introduced me to Reef. I'm not a big Euro-gamer (who would've guessed?) but I'm always up to try something new. In Reef, you are building a coral reef. It's sort of a spacial awareness game where you make stacks of different coloured coral and try to match patterns on cards to get the most points. On your turn you either play a card or take a card. Each card has two parts to it. The top part gives you two new coral pieces that you place on your board. The bottom part gives you points for the layout of your reef. For example, you might get 5 points for every 3 blue coral pieces in a row. Or maybe 5 points for every red piece of coral that is at the 4th level of a stack. I found it really hard to balance getting new cards with building my board properly, but I think I did alright. Shane crushed me, but, I had 50 points still. I would definitely give it another go as it only took us about 15 minutes to play. I can commit to 15 minutes of Euro.

The Dwarven Mine (Playthrough of Clank! Expeditions: Gold and Silk)

Grief the Thief (great at stealing, awful at coming up with a great nickname) had never tackled a dwarven mine before. He'd stolen from dragons and mummies, gone underground and underwater, and always came away with a pile of riches. Dwarves were well known for guarding their treasure more carefully than any others, but that's what made the job so exciting.

Custom Gloomhaven Insert

I finally finished my Gloomhaven insert! I spent about $3 at Dollar Tree buying foam board and hot glue refills. It probably took me about 10 hours over the course of a week to cut and glue everything together. So, depending how much my time is worth, this might have cost more then to buy a $100 insert online. But, now I can take pride in knowing I did it myself! 

Below is a video walkthrough of the insert. I tried to keep any spoilers out (i.e. I took out the cardboard standees I have for all of the heroes), but you will see all of the pieces (minus inside the hero boxes). Enjoy!

You Wood Not Believe My Score

We spent Saturday with some of our very best friends. They have kids close to our age and they're getting old enoug now (above that three year old mark) that we actually can play some games while they're awake. So Brennan and I pulled out a game of Kingdomino in front of a very excitable crowd of tiny people. Kingdomino is one of my very favourite games. I'm pretty sure there are some solo variants that I haven't bothered to look up because I really love this one multiplayer. Since we were only playing a two player game, we decided to shoot for a 7x7 grid instead of the usual 5x5. Above is pictured my finished kingdom - only missed out on one tile (curse Brennan, forcing that double forest piece on me).That 13 square, 5 crown area gave me a whopping 65 points. That gave me the 141-92 victory.

I want to take this moment to put in a plug for the Pointedly app. I don't know the developers at all, I believe it's a father-son duo, but I love this app. You can save all of your games and scores and different players. You can look back and see how many times you've won. There a few options to keep track of the score (lowest or highest score, in rounds or one shots, etc.). It's free but they do take donations. I recommend it.

Theo: 1; Report Cards: 0

Another school term and another set of report cards concquered. Although, I must admit, that I thought I had an extra week to put them together. Hence why I've been very absent this last week - (almost) every spare second has gone into writing those bad boys.

It's not the only thing I've been doing, though. My birthday is coming up and I've been thinking about asking for a Gloomhaven insert to make set up/tear down/fitting in the box a little bit easier. As I looked around though, it meant my wife would be dropping at least $75, but probably closer to $90 to get a good one. Could I justify that? No, I could not. That's whole new game I could ask for instead! So, I did what any normal person did and I trekked over to Dollar Tree, bought a few sheets of that foam board stuff, and started making my own insert. I'm about 80% done, just need to make two more big trays for the enemies and health/status trackers. Everything else has a perfect place and I'm really happy with how it's turned out. I'll post a video of it when I'm all done, but beware of spoilers! I'll be unable to hid every piece in the box when I show that insert, so watch at your peril if you don't want to know what all the enemies and heroes look like.

Not So Clever

We had a birthday party on the weekend. Logan's wife, Jenn, turned 26. So young, it disgusts me. Anyway, they went on a board game buying spree recently, including several of the popular roll and writes like Welcome To and Railroad Ink. We didn't try any of those, but I did get to play the wildly popular Ganz Schön Clever (German for "That's Pretty Clever").

What is Ganz Schön Clever? Think, Yahtzee on steroids. You roll six different coloured dice and each dice corelates to a different section of your score card. You can see in this picture to the right that there are yellow, blue, green, orange, and purple sections. You roll the dice and choose one die at a time and put it onto your scorecard. Each section works a little differently. 

In the yellow section, you cross out the number you've rolled and you're trying to get mini bingos (4 in a row). This gives you points or benefits in other sections. The blue section works similarly except you add the blue die to the white (wild) die. Rather than scoring points for a getting a row, though, you get points for how many blue boxes you've checked off. When adding to the green section, the first number needs to be 1 or less, then 2 or less, 3 or less, etc., until you get to 6 and then it resets. The more of these you fill in, the more points you get. The orange row gives you whatever number you picked, plus a few spots that double. In the purple row, the number to the right needs to be greater than the one to the left. Once you get a 6, though, it resets and you can put any number next. You add these up as well.


If you zoom in on the picture you'll notice a bunch of little symbols. By filling in sections you can get bonuses that let you reroll, take more dice, or check off boxes in other sections. There is a lot to think about here!

We only had time to play one game in between the festivities and trying to supervise and feed children and puppies, but here is my final score sheet and score. Not a bad first score (178), but Jenn kicked my butt (she had like 219 I think?). I'm not a huge fan of abstract rolling type games (such as Yahtzee), but this one was fun. There is a definitely a lot more strategy and choice involved to get the best score possible. I would definitely give this one another roll! (ha ha)

Sniped

They needed to put out that beacon before reinforcements arrived. The ratmen had been working hard to exterminate the humans from this part of the world. They were very close, but if the beacon was lit, it would all be for naught. But they didn't know how to stop that mysterious, magical man. He tore through their ranks like a knife through paper. Finally they were able to surround him, swarming him with their largest warriors. 

Kickstart or Kickstop?

I was (somewhat) recently reading an interesting forum on BoardGameGeek (although I can't seem to find it now?) that asked this question: "if you died today how many games would still arrive at your house after your death?" A morbid, yet interesting, thought. At the time I believe I would have had 3 arriving still, all of which would have been Kickstarters. I think that's really what this question is asking as most games ordered online from a games store or Amazon would take weeks at the most, whereas Kickstarter games take between months and years (sometimes more...).

Some people said 3, some said 5, some said 10, some said 30. I believe one individual said they'd still have 100 games coming to their house in the case that they died! How? Who has the money for that? 

The Hotness

I'm not great at keeping up with the newest and hottest and most anticipated games. Mostly because I don't have the money to buy that many games! Most of my games have been purchased after purging older ones and right now I'm pretty purged out. That being said, there are a few games coming out in 2019 that I am aware of and very excited about!

The best thing about this game is that It's already paid for. It was a Kickstarter last year and should be delivered in April. Unbroken is a solo-only game of revenge and retribution. You play a hero who has been attacked and left for dead. Your companions are all gone. Now you need to seek revenge and escape the depths you were left to die in. You sneak around collecting "resources" that are your skills and abilities. You need to use these to best the monsters that stand between you and freedom. 

I've watched a few videos and I'm not exactly sure how this game is going to play out, but I've heard only amazing things so far from those who have played the PnP or pretested the game. Heck, it even made the 2018 People's Choice Top 100 Solo Games list and it's not even released yet (it was #99). Really looking forward to this one.