I liked Assembly – our three-and-a-half star review shows that I think it’s a good game. That wasn’t really why I was excited to get a review copy though. I was excited because Wren Games have taken accessibility very seriously. There’s an excellent post available on their own website for…
Category: Board Game Accessibility
Samurai (1998) – Accessibility Teardown
Samurai is a game well defined by elegance – both in presentation and in the effectiveness of its simple, sparse rule-set. We gave it four stars in our review, noting that it’s a game where contemplation and momentum come together to create a something considerable more strategic than it might…
Mint Works (2017) – Accessibility Teardown
While Mint Works deserves credit for packing a full worker placement game into a tiny mint tin, in our view the game has little to recommend itself to your attention beyond the gimmick. It definitely works, but ‘functions adequately’ isn’t likely to find itself on any promotional literature any time…
Caverna: Cave versus Cave (2017) – Accessibility Teardown
Caverna: Cave versus Cave is a perfectly solid game but that’s not really sufficient in this day and age in and of itself. Competence is too low a bar to expect a game to clear, and while Cave versus Cave does so without meaningful error it still leaves me feeling…
Shadows in Kyoto (2017) – Accessibility Teardown
Parts of Shadow in Kyoto were beautiful enough to compel a purchase, but I can’t say the game as a whole really merits much affection. It relies too much on superficial depth when in reality you’d have as much success flipping a coin except at the higher-performing ends of human…
Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
Our review of Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr was almost certainly an uncomfortable read. Just imagine how uncomfortable it was to write. At the end of finishing any of these posts I often think ‘Phew, glad to get that one done’ but rarely is it accompanied with…
Eminent Domain: Microcosm (2014) – Accessibility Teardown
If it were a game with different theme I think Eminent Domain: Microcosm would probably be worth somewhat more than the miserly two and a half stars we gave it. That rathough though feels a good deal more appropriate when you consider how few stars it itself puts in the…
Kamisado (2008) – Accessibility Teardown
We liked Kamisado enough to give it three and a half stars in our review – it’s an enjoyable game of shared momentum and it has a lot to recommend it. I mean, not enough for us to give it more stars than we did that but a lot of…
News @ 11 (2015) – Accessibility Teardown
News @ 11 is great when it’s played by a compatible group but it’s the kind of thing I imagine would get a much better reception in a drama club than it would a gaming meetup. It puts a lot of pressure on people to be creative and funny and…
Queendomino (2017) – Accessibility Teardown
We’re going to hit the same issue here that we did with Codenames and Codenames Pictures. While Kingdomino and Queendomino are not the same game, they do share so much in terms of aesthetics and design that we’ve already sort of covered the accessibility. You can just look at our…
Wits & Wagers Family (2010) – Accessibility Teardown
I’m not really a fan of trivia games, or trivia in general. Wits and Wagers made a decent attempt to solve a lot of the problems I perceive in such endeavours but in the end it fell short of being truly compelling. We gave it two and a half stars…
Decrypto (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
Codenames is a well regarded game, but Decrypto is the title in that approximate area of the ludic landscape that I’m most keen to play. It’s full of its own quiet and inventive charm and solve a number of the problems I have with its more popular cousin. Codenames can…
Iota (2012) – Accessibility Teardown
Iota is a difficult game to play and not just because of its challenging and emergent placement rules. It’s just hard to visually process a game state that snakes over your table like a overlong chameleon with an erratic emotional connection to an overstimulating environment. Every card is part of…
Dropmix (2017) – Accessibility Teardown
The nature of Dropmix, its price, and its sustainability as a product makes it a difficult recommendation. Whether I’d advise people check it out is pretty much based on factors outside my control or ability to predict. If a homebrew scene appears I’d say ‘Yeeeaaaahh, kinda’ but it all depends…
Scrabble (1948) – Accessibility Teardown
Our review of Scrabble is more like a mediation on how to approach it as a war-game than it is a piece of game critique. I think Scrabble gets an unfair rap because so many people think It’s a word game and I am the first to agree it is…
Century: Eastern Wonders (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
The phenomenal quality of modern tabletop games is a blessing and a curse for a reviewer. It means there’s almost always a reason to be enthusiastic – very few games, save for those marketed and playtested exclusively on Kickstarter – are genuinely bad. At worst, most games are simply mediocre…
Telestrations (2009) – Accessibility Teardown
Telestrations is a game that can be ridiculous amounts of fun with a big enough group but suffers ever more the fewer people you have. We gave it four stars in our review as a kind of informal average – my own experiences with the game would have nudged it…
Tides of Madness (2016) – Accessibility Teardown
Tides of Madness is a taut and tense game of drafting cards and summoning Old Gods. It’s like Sushi Go: Sith Edition. It’s a perfectly good game – three and a half stars in our review is testimony of that. It thrives in situations where neither 7 Wonders or Sushi…
Exploding kittens: NSFW Deck (2015) – Accessibility Teardown
Exploding Kittens raised a sum of money more appropriate for a hurricane relief fund than a mediocre card game. We gave it two and a half stars in our review – it’s fun enough but really any joy you’ll find in the experience is likely directly related to the fact…
Dungeon Petz (2011) – Accessibility Teardown
Our view is that Dungeon Petz is a hot mess of overbearing mechanisms and prissy proceduralism. It’s a shame so lovely a theme should have been squandered on such an unnecessarily bureaucratic beast. We gave it two stars in our review, which as is often the case puts us fair…