Arcadia is a game where each player builds their own amusement park. You’ll be in charge of hiring staff and building attractions in an effort to have the best park at the table. Are you ready to build the next Disney World?
board games
Board Game Night Playlist: Deck-Building Games
In the late 2000s, Dominion took the board gaming world by storm. It essentially invented the deck-building genre of game, which has since been riffed on countless times. For those wanting to put on a deck-building game night, finding games is easy. Throw a rock into and game store and it’ll hit three deck builders before touching the ground.
With this edition of the Board Game Night Playlist, we’re going to build the perfect deck of cards within three different deck-building games. Let’s see what made the list this month!
Abracada…What? Review
A group of wizards have convened at the foot of a tower holding a mythical artifact. Fueled by greed and anger, these wizards engage in a battle for sole possession. However, that same greed and anger clouds their judgment, causing them to cast the wrong spells while hurting themselves in the process. Which mage will out-duel their adversaries and make it to the top of the tower?
Avoiding Disappointment With Your Board Game Purchases
Not every board game is going to meet your expectations. This is true with all things in life. However, it sucks more when you buy a big box board game and it’s a bust. With a physical copy of a disappointing video game, you can easily sell it back to the store for credit. With no easy way of unloading a disappointing board game, it’ll either take up space and collect dust on your shelf, or you’re going to have to actively move it through Kijiji or Board Game Geek.
As hard as we try to avoid it, there will be times when we add lemons to our collection. The best we can do is to try and avoid them. Here’s some tips on how to minimize your losses.
Animal Upon Animal: Small and Yet Great Review
Within the realm of board gaming enthusiasts, Animal Upon Animal is highly regarded as one of the best children’s games on the market. This game still eludes me, though I did get a chance to play its mini version. Animal Upon Animal: Small and Yet Great! features tiny wooden animals in a tiny box. Besides its small footprint, this one shrinks the player count, as only two players can enjoy this game instead of three or four like the original. I can’t really provide an opinion on how the two compare, but I can tell you about how much I enjoyed this animal stacking game.
Council of Verona Review
Council of Verona is a card game set in the Romeo and Juliet universe. Featuring the legendary star-crossed lovers as well as their supporting cast, this is a card game revolving around your actions as citizens in Verona trying to influence the events between the Montague and Capulet families. This may not be the most obvious focus for a Romeo and Juliet game, but does that make for a game that could catch you by surprise? Continue reading
Board Game Night Playlist: Board Games Inspired By Video Games
Video games owe a lot of its success to board games. Dungeons & Dragons alone has had elements of its gameplay cribbed by countless video games, such as the concepts of quests, health points, item usage, combat and more. If you dig far enough into the history of video games, you can probably find a theme or gameplay concept rooted in a board game. Video games have also innovated within its own space. From Super Mario to Call of Duty, there are a ton of unique experiences that have their roots in this digital medium.
Nowadays, you’ll see those video game specific concepts appear in board games. Whether they’re board games based on video game properties or digital gameplay mechanics that have gone analog, they feed off one one-another to push each other forward.
In this edition of the Board Game Night Playlist, we embark on an adventure that marries the best of both worlds. This list should be particularly interesting for video game fans looking for a smooth transition into the analog side of things. Time to press start on this playlist!
Board Game Geek’s Top 100 Rankings and it’s Impact on My Purchases
Whether its reviews from the major sites like IGN or Gamespot, or aggregate sites like GameRankings or Metacritic, there are a lot of different places you can go to find a ranking of the best video games. With so many different options to view, there isn’t really any consensus as to which list is the definitive list.
Board games are certainly different in this regard. There’s only one list that matters, and it’s the list on Board Game Geek. Ranked based on a countless number of user reviews, this is as close to a definitive list of the best board games as there is on the internet. The movers and shakers on the list are hotly debated, especially since Pandemic Legacy ousted the 5-year champ Twilight Struggle from the #1 spot at the beginning of this year. How does having this centralized ranking system impact my purchase decisions?
Lost Cities Review
From the Himilayan mountains to to the bottom of the sea, the world is yours for you and a friend to explore in Lost Cities. Designed by the legendary Reiner Knizia and published by Kosmos, this is a competitive two-player card game where players create expedition routes that will hopefully generate more discovery points than their opposition. Should you find a partner and head off on this card game adventure?
Board Game Pick-Up Post: July 2016 Edition
2016 has been a quiet year for board game shopping in our household, at least relative to years past. Part of that I feel is from a sense that we’ve largely caught up on past games that we’ve missed and now it’s mostly a matter of looking forward to upcoming new releases. Then there’s also the matter of our wedding, which did push the board games aside for a bit while we planned our nuptials.
So with life finally starting to settle down again, we took a trip to our friendly local game store. Two of the games we got were proven hits that we’ve played in the past. One is a hot new release that’s also a sequel to one of our faves.
In Third Person 