Hi there! It’s been a while since we posted anything on here, but are planning to start doing so again a little more frequently. We’re both quite perfectionistic, which is why posts are sometimes lying around for a while before we are fully content with them. However, we figured we could be just a little less self-critical and hit the publish button more often.
This month has been a great game month and we are almost up to a game a day these last four weeks. That’s why we figures we would share some of our thoughts about things we’ve recently been playing. Here goes!
Railroad Ink
So we missed out on this hype a little bit when we were at Spiel 2018. We did see everyone carry this game around, most people even holding both the red and the blue versions. Already owning Doodle City, we thought it wouldn’t add many new mechanics and that it wouldn’t hit our table as much. Just last week, we visited ZuiderSpel, which is a small Dutch board game convention. Already having been to Spiel, there weren’t many games that were completely new to us, so we went out to find games that we would have liked to play at Spiel but didn’t get the chance to. That’s how we ended up at the Railroad Ink stand and played a game. We loved it and immediately bought our own very reasonably priced copy!
Even though there are strong similarities with Doodle City, there is some more strategy in Railroad Ink that we liked. We have already played 6 games at different play counts and two of them were even on the train! We love that it’s so quick, yet tactical and that you constantly have to deal with whatever shows up on the dice.
Root
Okay, yes, we know we are a little late on this hype but we finally got our copy of Root. We knew this would probably be our type of game and after playing one game, we are already sure that it is. With the Kickstarter of The Underworld Expansion also slowly on its way, we are super excited to try out all the factions in the original game and the first expansion. I was particularly excited about trying out the Vagabond and did so in the second game. My raccoon friend and I didn’t win this time, but we had a great time!
Wingspan
We knew we would want to have this as soon as the little eggs popped up on Jamey Stegmaier’s social media. We have loved every single Stonemaier game we have played so far, so felt confident that this would fit our collection well. It doesn’t disappoint! We have only played two games so far, but there definitely was a richness to the detail of the different birds on the cards. My grandfather was the biggest bird-lover I know and this game makes me feel extremely connected to the love he had for birds as well. We can’t wait to explore all the other birds.
Overbooked
Overbooked was a little treat we discovered when we were visiting Zuiderspel too. It was over on a table with one of the smaller publishers in The Netherlands, that has only recently started producing heavier boardgames. We thought the game looked very fun and the theme sounded excited so we tried it out at the very end of the day. We had to rush over to the shop just after the end game scoring to get our own copy!
It is a very puzzle-oriented game, where you try to put passengers on your plane in tetris-like orientations. It has enough variety in the cards to remain interesting and additionally, it comes with different modules that can be implemented in the game to make it a bit harder if you are an experienced player. The artwork is loads of fun too, with different comic-like scenarios on the player boards and basically all game pieces. We saw that the edition by Randomskill games has a completely different look. In our opinion it’s worth getting the Jumbo version just for the art!
Mysthea
About a year ago, I was living in London for a few months and Marijn was at home in Eindhoven. This is when he backed some projects on Kickstarter and up until this day I am not even sure how many there were. Every few months, a new one comes in and I just let myself be surprised. This month, Mysthea arrived and I was a little scared by the size of the box and once the box opened up, the size of the miniatures too. However, I was happy to find that there were much fewer rules to remember than I initially thought!
Mysthea is an area control game where you try to gain control over different regions on five floating islands. Yes, floating. The board has modular islands on it that can be moved around to create different orientations throughout the game. In the mean time, you try to slay off alien-like monsters, which you do cooperatively, and you try to come out of the round with the most points, which you – of course – do competitively. We have to play this game a few more times to be able to say something sensible about it because it is quite heavy but we enjoyed the first play!
Of course, these aren’t the only games we have played in March. In the list you can also find Pandemic Legacy Season 2, Dice Hospital, Dice Forge, Scythe: The Rise of Fenris and Charterstone. If you want to know more about our experiences with these games, let us know in the comments!
What did you get to the table this past month?
