Category: Board Game Accessibility

I have perhaps become a little too emboldened by doing the teardown for Thousand Year Old Vampire.  That was a nice, self-contained little creativity exercise that was more amenable to this kind of process than many other RPG systems.   And now I’m doing Blades in the Dark which is a…

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If our review of Thousand Year Old Vampire was an experiment in exploring outside our comfort zone, it’s the laboratory of the accessibility teardown that has the results in which I’m really interested.   There are lots of reasons to believe a teardown on a roleplaying system can’t be a useful…

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Quacks of Quedlinburg is a push your luck game where fortune winks and says ‘Oh wow, you’re so brave, good for you kiddo!’.  This, despite knowing full well, that this is gambling with the training wheels on.   The risk built into its mechanisms is illusory, and as a result…

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I didn’t really get a lot of joy out of Walking in Burano.   It’s one of an awkward class of games to review – ‘games that don’t give you a lot to talk about’.  Those that do this kind of work professionally – or even just more diligently than I…

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Fallout Shelter is about as shallow an implementation of the franchise as you can get and still meaningfully be worth the description.   It’s a perfectly okay game – three stars of okay – but it feels like such a missed opportunity when far more exciting usages of the licence would…

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Inhuman Conditions is an unfortunate game.  It’s a brave idea that just doesn’t, at least in my experience, work often enough to be worth playing.   It got one and a half stars in our review.  But there’s ambition there – a two player social deduction experience was always going to…

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Lost Ruins of Arnak, despite being constructed from ‘weel-kent’ parts, was a breath of fresh air to me.  A game that felt new because of how well it was put together as opposed to being built from unique components.  That’s not to say it had no innovation – I think…

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We liked Nusfjord a lot.   Its design is clever in a subtle way, encoding some darkly comic capitalism hidden within a palimpset of relatively sedate Norwegian agriculture.   You may spend the game hiring specialists and erecting buidings, but there is a drum-beat signalling your inevitable end beating away in the…

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Medium is a fine game – at least, in its wild form as the energetic folk-game that has been a staple of improv groups and school camps since the early 90s.   This actual boxed product though feels exploitative in a way that makes me unwilling to recommend it your way. …

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We liked Prisma Arena, but move set considerations and an overly smooth team topography mean that we don’t love it.   Oodles of potential though – we gave it three and a half stars in our review.   But I have saved some of my most positive comments for this teardown, because…

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We gave Architects of the West Kingdom four stars in our review.   It’s not awash in new ideas, but the central one it does have is wonderful – it truly reinvigorates a formula that I absolutely would not have enjoyed otherwise.   It’s a really nice game and it’s well worth…

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Trial by Trolley is pretty much as good as any other party game, but it has an odd premise that makes it an uncomfortable fit for a lot of scenarios.  It offers a more literate take on social gaming, but those that would appreciate it most are also the ones…

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For me, Spell Smashers is an instructive case study in the idea that ‘When the Gods wish to punish us, they first grant our prayers’.  It’s almost exactly a game I asked for someone to make, and yet all I feel when playing it is frustration.   There’s just too much…

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We liked Sanctum a lot.  While noting it has a couple of significant problems in its combat systems and its upgrade path feasibility we also gave it a four star review because it’s very satisfying to play.   It’s Diablo in a box.  It’s a board game with the soul of…

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While Legacy of Dragonholt may be more book than game, it’s certainly a well produced piece of entertainment and one that I enjoyed frittering about with for a while.   We gave it three and a half stars in our review, noting that while it certainly won’t appeal to everyone it…

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Targi is a genuinely excellent game that, if we’re honest with ourselves, would have been a much better and more positive choice with which to break our hiatus.   What’s done is done though and there’s no use crying about it now.    We gave Targi four and a half stars in…

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Urgh, you’d think after a four month break I wouldn’t be so grumpy coming back to this site.  Despite giving Corinth three stars in our review I also managed to wrap that up in some of the most fiercely negative commentary this site has given in quite some time.  Having…

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It seems mean to say it, but I sort of wish that Parks, rather than Wingspan, was getting all the mainstream attention.   It’s not just a better game, it’s a better game for the specific niche that Wingspan seems to have dominated – something endearing enough to bring non-gamers organically…

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Bang the Dice Game is a perfectly okay game about banging and dice.   It’s inoffensive to an extreme.   Briefly amusing with a social cost for playing that can’t really be at all justified in comparison to what its required player count would otherwise let you do of an evening.  We…

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Wavelength is a fascinating, interesting game of staring into the bleak abyss that exists in the gulf between inside and outside of our heads.  It’s a solipsist horror story of abject isolation.   A game of learning what it means to truly be alone in a universe vast beyond all human…

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