“Sushi Go!” is one heck of a card game, seeing as how it’s both easy and fun all at the same time. “Sushi Go Party!” is like “Sushi Go! 2.0” in that it introduces a lot more content but maintains the same general flow of play. For those of you unfamiliar with “Sushi Go!”, it’s essentially a pass-and-play set collecting game. You shuffle a deck of cards and each player is dealt a random hand. You then choose one to play and pass the rest of your hand to your left. Using the cards you’ve received from the person on your right, you’ll again choose a card to play and pass the hand off. When everyone is out of cards the round ends and points are tallied. Instead of using the same deck of cards every time, “Sushi Go Party!” lets players customize their own loadout from a number of new (and old) card types.
Board Games
On an impulse buy, I picked up “Battle Line” for under twenty bucks on Amazon (search the Amazon widget on the right to find it) and boy, I’m glad I did. Essentially, you and one other player are battling for control of pawns. On each pawn, you can assign a total of three cards. The better hand (straight flush, 3 of a kind, flush, straight, etc.) on any particular pawn allows it to be controlled by that player. The aim is to capture three pawns in a row or five in all.
Mazes have a habit of making me feel like an idiot. I mean, I consider my self fairly intelligent…but put me into a hedge maze and you won’t see me again for another three years. Hell, just drop me off in the woods somewhere…my sense of direction is THAT bad. “Duel Maze” doesn’t make me feel like an idiot though…quite the contrary. It’s a two player game that tasks players with moving their dice to their colored goal markers and the first to three points, wins! Before we begin, I’d like to thank the folks at Player4 for providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
“Deadfall” sounds like the title of the next James Bond movie, but it’s actually a card game that’s both easy and relatively quick to play. In Deadfall, players will be utilizing a “Pairs” deck…that is, a deck of cards valued 1-10 consisting of one 1, two 2’s, three 3’s, and so on. Players receive 50 coins or chips (not included) to start their pool along with a hand of six cards (five in a seven player game, seven in a two player game). Special thanks to Cassidy Werner from Cheapass Games for providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
Retrogamers like myself can appreciate a good “SHMUP” (Shoot-em-up)…that is, a game where you control some type of craft and progressively head in one direction, shooting enemies as you go. “Inglorious Space” brings this idea to the tabletop and shares a partial likeness to “Life Force” by Konami. Before you impress me with you Konami code knowledge in the comments below…”Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start”. I’d like to quickly thank the folks at Black Table Games for providing me with a press copy for preview purposes.
Are YOU dumber than a box of rocks? Brave enough to find out? Then perhaps you should give “Box of Rocks” a spin, a trivia game that poses questions to where the answer is either 0, 1, or 2. The rocks have notches on them and are shaken up in the box after a question is asked…the number of notches revealed will indicate the game’s answer. Both your group and the game score points along a track for every correct answer and the first to the top, wins! It’s a relatively simple trivia game that, I’m told, will demoing at Gen Con in August 2016 and retailing in early 2017. If you like trivia games and think you’re smarter than a box of rocks, then keep an eye out for this one!
Have you ever played a simple card game and yearned for that little extra push that would make it slightly more interesting? Want to spice up a conversation by making a game out of it? Look no farther, because “Subtle Much?”, a game that’ll be launching on Kickstarter in May 2016, has you covered. “Subtle Much?” is designed to be played whilst playing another game or performing some other group activity, tasking players with completing secret objectives in order to score points. Before we get into specifics, I’d like to thank Kyle Warwick (the Founder of Moresome Games) for providing me with a prototype for preview purposes. It’s important to stress that prototypes aren’t often reflective of the final product, making everything you read about here subject to change.
Five minutes. Five minutes are all you have to save the planet from a meteor storm the likes of our kind has never seen. What’s worse, Bruce Willis is nowhere in sight. All you have are your quick wits and the brains of those around you, with your ultimate goal being to collectively launch enough rockets to blow the giant rocks from space. Before we start mixing the rocket fuel and singeing our eyebrows, I’d like to thank the folks at Mayday Games for providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
I can’t keep up with kids today anymore. I remember a day when being “radical” or “gnarly” was a thing…now I have to ask my family (or sometimes Google) when I come across a word that you’d usually not find in the dictionary. As fortune would have it, I’m a gamer…meaning I know all about being “pwned”. For those of you not of the leetspeak, it’s generally used as a verb in place of the word “owned”. So if you absolutely humiliated someone in a game or event, then you can have said to have “pwned” them. Of course you knew that already, which is “dope” (either that or “cray-cray”, I have to go check Google again).
I always took great pleasure in watching either a teacher or host perform a science experiment as it usually captivated me every time. My biology teacher once placed an ice cube into two separate beakers of clear liquid…one sank while the other floated. I’m proud to say that I was the first to figure out that one of the beakers didn’t in fact contain pure water but something else, making it less dense than the ice cube. Anywho, the folks at Blue Orange Games were nice enough to send me “Dr. Eureka”, a family board game tasking players to complete experiments with test tubes and differently colored balls. Go check out my video review below to see how the game is played and what I thought. Thanks again Audrey!
I’m absolutely horrible at “Concentration”…you know, the game where you have to flip two tiles and hope they match? Of course, they usually don’t, meaning you have to remember what was where when you do find a particular tile’s twin. Luckily, “Fast Flip” is more of a mind-teaser as opposed to a memory exercise. Here, players will be attempting to earn points by being the first to call out the number of a particular fruit or the fruit that shows up a certain number of times. There’s also two other ways to play, so check out my video review below to see how it all works. Special thanks to Audrey from Blue Orange Games for providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
I previously praised “The Great Heartland Hauling Company” for being a “fun game that has the right mix of resource management and economic functionality”. I couldn’t help but me reminded of the aforementioned game while giving “Isle of Trains” a spin. In short, each player will be building and upgrading a train in an attempt to make deliveries and earn victory points. What’s “coal” (see what I did there?) about this game though is that the cards you’ll play have many different uses. Let’s take a look at the rules and show you what I mean.
Oh city builders, how I love thee. The real world might prevent me from bulldozing all of the houses on my street (except for mine, of course) and replacing them with nothing but soft-serve kiosks that are open 24/7…but in fantasy land, I can do whatever I want. While I may not be able to construct an ice cream empire in “Quadropolis”, I can construct a small city and power/man it almost any way I’d like to. The catch is that each type of building (towers, shops, factories, etc.) score differently based on where they are and what’s around them. So ready your architects, because we’re going to be building stuff!
I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted building a house only to have it explode because of some cheeky little creeper. Fans of the game know that I’m talking about “Minecraft”, because the only creepers in real life are those who haven’t figured out what boundaries are. “Minecraft Card Game?” tasks players with crafting items and earning points by drafting materials from a central pool.
I’m not what you would call an outdoorsman, especially when it’s muddy and/or cold. Call me crazy, but most of my time is spent indoors either being a parent, reading a book, or playing/reviewing a game of some type with the family. While “Tally Ho!” revolves around the idea of two players hunting each other, they can do so without leaving the comfort of their dining room table. One player will take on the role of the hunters and lumberjacks while the other plays as the bears and foxes. They can both hunt neutral game like ducks and pheasants to earn points, or simply hunt each other based on their individual movement / hunting rules. Before I get into all that however, I’d like to thank Eve Vergnes from Southard Communications, Inc. for providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
When it comes to history outside of the US, I’m absolutely clueless. When I hear “War of the Roses”, for example, I just picture two English dudes with monocles and cups of tea slapping each other in the face with a bouquet of roses. Now that I’ve lost half of my European audience, lets move on to why we’re really here: “The Rose King”, a two player game that focuses on area control. Special thanks to Eve Vergnes from Southard Communications, Inc. for providing me with a press copy for review purposes.