Games like Joking Hazard often get treated with casual disdain in the hobbyist game reviewer space. ‘Not really for us’, we sniff while quaffing vintage meeples from a plastic goblet. ‘Gauche. Vulgar. Base. Low art’, we sneer while liberally loading refined d20 pate onto cardboard crackers. And yet, these games…
Category: Board Game Accessibility
The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014) – Accessibility Teardown
While I don’t think Castles of Mad King Ludwig is quite as fascinating a design as Suburbia, it might well be a more fun game. It depends really on what you want out of a box like this – an emergent story of compromise and consequence, or something that sacrifices…
The Estates (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
The Estates got a pretty rough ride in our review. It’s undeniably a well designed game, but one that leaves me so unhappy at the end of play that I just want no part of it. I’m not opposed to a streak of meanness in my game. I just don’t…
No Thanks (2004) – Accessibility Teardown
No Thanks is a marvellous design for a game. It’s like a behavioural economics experiment in a box, teaching you which of your friends will jump on a grenade to save the group. Spoiler – it’s probably none of them. We gave it four stars in our review, although it…
Archaeology: The New Expedition (2016) – Accessibility Teardown
We like Archaeology: The New Expedition a lot. It got four stars in our review, each of them unilaterally removed from the temple of an ancient sky god in a faraway land. It’s not looting. It’s preservation. They belonged in a museum. Provided that museum had massive amounts of cash…
Second Chance (2019) – Accessibility Teardown
Second Chance was… well, a kind of second chance for polyomino placement games on Meeple Like Us. Until they start getting meaner, our interest will remain muted at best. Interestingly, this game is actually worth your attention because of how aggressively it moves away from the obvious goal and into…
Inis (2016) – Accessibility Teardown
While we can only review Inis as a two-player game, I have no doubt that when you try it out with a bigger group of people it’s going to shine like a damn diamond. Even at the (occasionally bumpy) two player mode it’s a gem of a game. Four stars…
Doppelt So Clever (2019) – Accessibility Teardown
Every so often I have a kind of a ‘cheat’ teardown. It doesn’t happen regularly, but occasionally there is a game that is so similar to another that I can get along with saying ‘check out this other teardown, with the following changes’. Doppelt So Clever is sufficiently close to…
Mint Delivery (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
We didn’t have much positive to say about Mint Delivery, which at least means our view is consistent since we also didn’t have much positive to say about Mint Works. ‘They are games that function’. ‘Full components in the tin’. Neither of those are blurbs likely to appear gracing the…
Isle of Trains (2014) – Accessibility Teardown
Isle of Trains was an unexpected gem – a game I initially played with no real enthusiasm but pretty soon realized I had something quite special on my hands. That doesn’t happen as often as I like, and I suspect it did here because this is a game that’s a…
Roll Player (2016) – Accessibility Teardown
The biggest problem that Roll Player has is that it’s a good game without a great use-case. It’s too nerdy in its theme to really be an ideal pick for a ‘non gamer’ audience. Its excessively forgiving design means that in a world that contains both Sagrada and Azul it’s…
Eclipse: A New Dawn for the Galaxy (2011) – Accessibility Teardown
Eclipse is an excellent game. In the olden days, a gaming mag would undoubtedly have called it a ‘stonking corker of a game’, and everyone would have known exactly how good it was. I concur. Eclipse is a stonking corker of a game. We gave it four and a half…
Istanbul (2014) – Accessibility Teardown
We liked Istanbul a lot and gave it four stars in our review. Oddly for a title about building and leveraging efficiency it’s quite a merciful game. When you stumble, it makes sure you’re not out of the running. That’s an interesting feature. It’s an endearing feature. And it’s hopefully…
The Quest for El Dorado (2017) – Accessibility Teardown
The Quest for El Dorado is a light-hearted, light-weight romp through an unforgiving terrain. It’s also probably the best way I’ve seen to teach deck-building as a game mechanism to a novice audience. It’s a good game too – three and a half stars of good. Really it’s the perfect…
Gizmos (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
We liked Gizmos a lot when we played it but it has to be said as a puzzle it is notably difficult for some people to crack. In our review we discussed the expectations required for programmatic thinking – for the ability to construct and execute upon subroutines – and…
Raiders of the North Sea (2015) – Accessibility Teardown
We liked Raiders of the North Sea to the tune of three and a half stars. It’s a good game. A fun game. A game that makes no real missteps while also not really putting its feet anywhere particularly risky. It’s a very safe design, doing little to innovate with…
Scotland Yard (1983) – Accessibility Teardown
Scotland Yard is a game that was remarkable at the time – clever, creative and the first game of which I can think where the formula of a hidden movement game was fully expressed. It doesn’t stand up quite so well today, but there’s only so much you can expect…
Exodus – Proxima Centauri (2013) – Accessibility Teardown
It’s been a while since we’ve covered a really excellent game on the blog. Exodus: Proxima Centauri has broken a stream of subdued praise by virtue of being a genuinely superb game of space exploration and conquest. It’s a beefy game, with complicated rules and a lengthy playtime – but…
Carta Impera Victoria (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
Carta Impera Victoria (CIV) is a game that has almost no hints in its external design as to the kind of game it actually is. It looks like a race when it’s really a bitterly pointed tug-of-war where every player must violently get in the way of every other player…
Clacks (2015) – Accessibility Teardown
Oh, how I want to love Clacks. I want to love any game that looks to expand the Discworld franchise that I so adore. As I write this I’m contemplating the logistics of moving to Sweden as a result of a job offer. I’ve separated out my thousands of books…