Joking Hazard is a fun game, and perhaps that ought to be enough for any of us. It doesn’t have to be clever, or original. It just has to be worth playing….
Category: Board Game Review
The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014)
The very first game I ever reviewed for this site was Suburbia. That was the title that sent me down a path of inquiry that would consume, at this point, almost four years of my life. Never before had I seen a collection of physical components that was so interesting…
The Estates (2018)
The Estates is a well-designed game and I don’t like it. Worse, I don’t want to like it. That’s an awkward pitch for a review. The last time I had a similar issue was when I reviewed Catan – a game that makes me so angry I can only play…
No Thanks (2004)
The games about which people often get the most excited are the ones that look substantial. Big, bold, beautiful games. Thematic monsters with miniatures and rulebooks thick enough to choke an otter. Complicated games are difficult to get right because they have so many different elements that need to be…
Archaeology: The New Expedition (2016)
Archaeology: The New Expedition strikes me as a game I shouldn’t like. It’s very random, driven far more by luck of the draw than skill with cards. It’s very simple, comprising mostly of set collection and little else. It’s a little bit off-putting in its framing, explicitly casting you as…
Second Chance (2019)
The last time I covered a polyomino placement game (Cottage Garden) I said that I probably wouldn’t look at another game of this type unless it actually captured what I feel to be the most important aspect of what I’ve occasionally referenced as ‘Tetris style games’. For me, that’s the…
Inis (2016)
I don’t really feel like I’ve given Inis the best possible crack of the whip. It’s been languishing on the ‘to review’ pile for a year and a half because I thought ‘I suspect this is a better game at higher player counts’, and I’d only managed to try it…
Doppelt So Clever (2019)
You might well remember a game called Ganz Schön Clever. We reviewed on the site a while ago. For a few weeks, it was pretty much all anyone on Twitter was talking about. Like many people, I fell hard into the depth of its moreish design. Like a kind of…
Mint Delivery (2018)
Given that I have already reviewed Mint Works and concluded ‘not for me’, it might seem like an act of masochism to take a look at Mint Delivery. They came as part of a single Kickstarter reward though and I’d always intended to eventually get to it. I intend to…
Isle of Trains (2014)
Every so often when running this site I sit down with a game about which I feel absolutely nothing. No excitement. No trepidation. At most, a sense of weary resignation that a necessary responsibility is about to be competently discharged. Sometimes I don’t even remember where the game came from…
Roll Player (2016)
If I’m being honest, the thing I enjoy the most in any RPG campaign is character creation. There’s something in the process that manages to convey all the excitement and potential of a campaign without any of the corresponding disappointment of actually putting your hero to the test. The attributes,…
Eclipse: A New Dawn for the Galaxy (2011)
A short time ago, we discussed Exodus: Proxima Centauri. One of our concluding remarks was as follows:
People sometimes talk of Exodus as a streamlined version of Twilight Imperium. It strikes me though that what I’d really like to see is a streamlined version of Exodus itself.
I’ll let you into a…
Istanbul (2014)
Playing Istanbul is a little bit like wresting a reluctant A* algorithm into grudging, malevolent obedience. A lot of games are built on the idea of optimisation – that your goals are best served by ensuring the maximum yield for the minimum expenditure. It’s a mechanism that is hard-wired into…
The Quest for El Dorado (2017)
The mechanism of deck-building is undeniably effective – it’s such a clearly satisfying system that it’s hard to go too wrong with it. Imagine a poker deck-builder where with every hand you get rid of a bad card from your deck and replace it with a better card, sometimes with…
Gizmos (2018)
Gizmos is something of an awkward blend. At first glance it’s a light, breezy and intuitive game of picking up marbles and spending them to build ever greater contraptions that yield ever greater effectiveness. It plays though like Potion Explosion’s brainy older sibling – the one that graduated top of…
Raiders of the North Sea (2015)
I’ve said this several times over the past few years – the hardest reviews to write are those of good games. Those games that aren’t amazing, and aren’t awful – those games that are just solidly good. With a great game you can enthuse about the elements of its design…
Wingspan (2019) – Accessibility Teardown
Wingspan has been something of a phenomenon, generating sales and attentions that far outstrip the expectations of people that work and comment in this industry. It’s a beautifully presented game with the typical Stonemaier attention to detail, but in my experience it falls awkwardly between the conceptual accessibility of its…
Wingspan (2019)
Let me take a slightly different tack with this review of Wingspan than I would normally. Let me do it as a story of first impressions and an extended meditation on the nature and value of theme.
We all know theme is an important element of a game – a good…
Scotland Yard (1983)
It occurred to me this morning that we hadn’t yet tackled a hidden movement game for Meeple Like Us. Here we are, almost two hundred games done, and we’ve managed to miss this whole genre entirely. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. I will begin to make my penance by talking…
Exodus – Proxima Centauri (2012)
I’ve never actually played Twilight Imperium and that’s one of my main board gaming regrets. As a forty-one year old man though, carving out a day to play through one session of a single game is a bad use of my time. As part of the Meeple Like Us review…