Tales from the Tavern

A group of evil monsters has stolen all the drinks in the land of Barcadia, and now it’s up to your merry band of adventurers to brave the dungeon and recover all the drinks. Or… something like that. Heroes of Barcadia is less about the narrative and more about the laughs and, of course, the drinks. What exactly is it, then?

Well, it’s a dungeon-crawling game for 2-6 players (or up to 8 with the expansion), but unlike many dungeon-crawlers, you’re in direct competition. These other heroes are not your allies; they are your rivals! After all, what good is recovering the lost hoard of stolen drinks if it’s not you getting all the glory? You’ll take turns exploring the dungeon to find power-ups and slay monsters. Once you have three power-ups, you can try to take on the final boss and recover the drink hoard.

As a game, it’s… pretty basic. Heroes of Barcadia keeps the gameplay dead simple. There’s very little room for strategy. The rooms you uncover, the power-ups you get, and the dice you roll to fight the monsters are all random. You have little control over your destiny here. It is less of a game and more of a classed-up, shiny new way to have fun with your friends and…

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They had me with the cover art.

With the release of Trolls & Princesses, Game Brewer has once again given the world a fantastic physical production. The publisher, known for Eurogame titles like Oak, Paris, Stroganov, Gentes, and Gùgōng, always nails the look: great components, clean box covers, sharp visuals, and games that might lean a little too hard into language-free iconography.

I have played Gentes and Oak, and enjoyed both games. With Trolls & Princesses, I raised my hand to cover this game right away thanks to the comical cover art of a nasty-looking troll holding a human baby and carting a princess (with a miffed look on her face) off to do who-knows-what. It’s a hard image to shake, which told me I needed to play the game.

Trolls & Princesses is interesting. As great as it looks, everyone who sat with me for plays (each of my plays took place with three players) came away from the game impressed by the production and amused by the game’s theme. But as a game, Trolls & Princesses mostly left players at “yeah, OK, that was fun” and not much more excited than that.

Part of the reason: the princesses.

“Church Bells, Changelings and Outposts” Doesn’t…

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How do you rate a board game like Monikers? Much like Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind, which took an old theatre camp game and committed it to paper, Monikers is a curated rendition of an old favorite. I have always called it Salad Bowl. You may know it as The Name Game, The Hat Game, Celebrities, or a number of other options. How do you review something that’s always been there? How, exactly, does one review Charades?

A Rose by Any Other Moniker

In the traditional game, the first stage involves handing out slips of paper and pens, on which everyone writes a word. These can be famous people, events, concepts, whatever you want, really. Like most party games, the exact parameters are up to the group.

Monikers elides that. The box is full of cards with pre-printed prompts, like Oprah, The Kraken, A Russian Nesting Doll. You know, the classics. From there, the structure is identical to the original game. In lieu of pieces of paper, each player is dealt a pile of cards, from which they choose whichever appeal to them. Those cards are shuffled into a deck, which is set in the…

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Maybe it says something about my personality, the speed with which I leapt at the chance to review Deadly Dowagers. Two to six players compete as Victorian dowagers to accumulate a dowry sufficient to attract a Duke by investing in properties and “strategic serial marriages.” It is a satirical card game of murder and manipulation. Sounds like a ripping good time, doesn’t it? 

Designed by Sarah Shipp with art by Mercedes Palacios, Sparkworks (Panorama and the Princess Bride series of games) has a fitting release for International Womens’ Day. 

“Darling, could you fetch the cake knife?”

Deadly Dowagers plays over an unspecified number of rounds until someone marries the Duke and rides off into the suspiciously blood-stained sunset. Each round consists of four phases: The first is a Draft in which players select one card from a dwindling hand and pass the rest, collecting four altogether. The second involves playing cards into a tableau as Investments. The third is the Husband phase where you might marry or, if already married, arrange for the untimely death of said husband, or perhaps marry and kill on the same turn. Or neither. (You know how fickle these affairs can be.) The final “phase” is hardly a phase at all beyond reminding everyone that no more than three cards may remain in hand…

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‘Neath the Eyeball of Saint Isidore

We all had to memorize the opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue from Canterbury Tales, right? Eighteen lines of Middle English poetry—and one gigantic run-on sentence at that! English teachers love that sort of thing. For those who may have forgotten or been spared altogether, I’ll summarize. It’s April and Nature has pricked the conscience of various pilgrims to strike out on the road toward Canterbury to make all matters of the soul right once again. 

Such is the setting of the 2011 classic The Road to Canterbury. Upon reading that designer Alf Seegert’s graduate degrees include both Philosophy and English, the subject material and its treatment suddenly makes sense. The road is darkly endearing, a demonstration of more than a working knowledge of Mr. Chaucer with just enough humor to be approachable.

Where Chaucer introduces two dozen (or so) pilgrims, Seegert’s creation zooms in on one—the Pardoner. The game is limited to either two or three players, both or all of whom assume the role of a Pardoner straddling the penitential fence. The two tasks at hand are to tempt pilgrims unto one of the seven deadly sins while simultaneously taking a financial interest in issuing something of a bogus absolution. There are Relics to relish. Sinners will die. Someone will be declared…

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My two kids, ages 8 and 5, love games. I usually steer them towards family games, particularly games that align with my 5-year-old son so that all of us can play together. Bonus points if the game is cooperative, because my son still can’t deal with losing.

My hope is that one day, my kids can scale up to, say, Brass: Lancashire or a light Lacerda, like Vinhos: Deluxe Edition. For now, games like The Quest Kids and Turtle Mania do the job for family play, but I am just setting the table for the days when I can try to go toe-to-toe with my kids in a medium weight Euro puzzle.

But let’s imagine my kids were, say, 12 and 9. First Rat (2022, Pegasus Spiele) might be the perfect game for what I’m trying to build towards, a game that rewards efficiency, timing, and has the production elements I look for in a Eurogame experience. Plus, you’ve got some of the hallmarks of standard Euro fare: scoring tracks, variable player powers, resource gathering, milestones, and the like.

Combine all of that with rats and a game board that reminds older players of a darkly-shaded version of Candy Land, and you’ve got something that will really shine with parents who want their…

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At the Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

Starting in Hollywood’s silent era, film studios created double bills,  or pairs of films shown to provide a full evening’s worth of entertainment. The first film of these Double Features was the main feature, the longer film with the biggest stars, or the A Movie. The second, shorter film with lesser-known actors, became known as the B Movie.

By the 1940s B Movies were becoming their own genre of films. Moving away from low-budget versions of their counterparts, B Movies took on “topical issues”—frequently sordid and controversial topics featuring violence and prison. This led to the teen movie craze and cheap horror films of the 1950s with titles like “I Walked With a Zombie”, “The Body Snatcher”, and “I was a Teenage Werewolf.”

[caption id="attachment_257647" align="aligncenter" width="306"] B Movies: The Box[/caption]

The undisputed King of the B Movies was Roger Corman. Corman’s filmography has some amazing titles: She Gods of Shark Reef; Teenage Caveman; A Bucket of Blood; X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes; Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (featuring The Ramones); and perhaps his best-known film, 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors.

Chances are, you’ve seen movie titles like these and thought, ‘I could come up…

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Sometimes when you hit upon a simple game design concept, you’ve just gotta run with it. The concept might be as easy as a deck of cards and a writing board; and when that game turns out to be loads of fun to play, well, that’s just icing on the cake. Join Andy as he reviews Blank Slate from The Op.

Blank Slate in 90 Seconds

In Blank Slate players compete to be the first to earn 25 points by “completing” words or phrases printed on a card drawn by the current player.

Setup is quick: pass out a miniature dry erase board and marker to each player, shuffle the deck of word/phrase cards, and write everyone’s names down on the dry erase scoreboard.

Draw a card, then pick your preferred side. The cards will all have a single word or part of a word, and an empty space. Sometimes the space is at the beginning, sometimes it’s at the end. Show all the other players the card, then get to work.

Your goal is to write something in the blank space that completes a full word or phrase. Scoring is almost as easy. Once everyone has revealed their…

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If I may, I’d like to begin by wading into unexpected waters. In mathematics, a combination is the term for a calculation to find the number of ways to choose a certain sized sample from a larger group. If you had three unique objects and you wanted to choose two of them, there are three possible ways to accomplish the goal. If you had ten objects and you wanted to choose four, the possibilities jump to 210. 

If you had 243 unique objects, and you wanted to choose 70, you would find an astronomical figure. A vigintillion, in fact. 1.3 x 10^62 to be exact. That’s a number that lingers somewhere between the utterly incomprehensible octillion and the even more impenetrable googol. I’m not sure who first coined the term astronomical for numbers beyond the scope of human understanding, but they were on to something. It’s hard enough to fathom one million of anything, let alone more—the scope reaches cosmic proportions.  

But I suppose you didn’t come here for math. You came here for murder. 

Awkward Guests was designed by Ron Gonzalo García and developed by the team at Megacorpin Games. Building on the tradition of classic whodunnit games like Clue and Mystery of the Abbey, Awkward Guests utilizes a deck of…

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Camping can be an idyllic return to nature, one where you leave the bustling highways and city life behind for the untroubled tranquility of the wilderness.

Or, camping can be a constant struggle to survive as bears attack with the intention of eating you at every turn.

Care to guess which one we’re talking about today?

[caption id="attachment_251036" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Fight a Bear box[/caption]

Setup

Start by dividing the cards into four separate decks based on their backing color: Blue (Equipment), Yellow (Baby Bear), Orange (Bad Bear), and Red (Extra Bad Bear) cards. 

Place the three Bear decks, face-down, within easy reach of all players. 

Then turn six Blue equipment cards face up to create “Crazy Willy’s Shop”. (Seriously, don’t ask. I’ll get to it soon enough.) 

Give each player a Stock card. Cut out the tiny Food, Tooth, and, um, Explosion(?) icon squares and give one of each to all players. The food square is placed atop the star at 10. The explosion and tooth icons start, unscored, at the top of the Stock card. 

[caption id="attachment_251037" align="aligncenter" width="464"] Stock card and cut out Food, Tooth,…

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What makes a good party game? Higher player counts, of course. Relatively light rules. Something that fosters social interaction. You’re looking for something that tweaks the environment just enough, something that gives it a focal point, but not something so involved that people will stop talking to each other. The goal of a party game, broadly speaking, is for the game itself to disappear into the social interactions surrounding it.When pulled off correctly, party games are wondrous to play, but the very qualities that make them such a delight can also make them difficult to review. Did I have a good time because the game is good, or because I was with the right group of people? Sometimes, the answer is obvious. Just One, Codenames, these are games that introduce some magic into the room. With games like TBH, which advertises itself as “the game of honest answers to outrageous questions,” the answer is less clear.

Dilemma Boss

Each turn, a new player becomes the Dilemma Boss—that’s what it says in the manual—who will choose one of two cards drawn from the deck, each of which contains a scenario and a question. They then read the card aloud to the table.

…

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The idea of Coyote is simple enough. Each player is dealt one card, which they do not look at, and sets it in the provided base so that all the other players can see it. An additional card is placed face down in the middle of the table, and can only be inspected by players with Peek cards to spend. The cards number from -10 to 20, with two additional special cards. On your turn, you either say a total you believe to be less than the total value of all the cards—keeping in mind that your information will never be perfect since you can never see your own card—or you challenge the previous player.

If…

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Before we begin, please sanitize your hands. Don your lab coat. Wipe your glasses clean. Take a deep breath. And another. Remember that science class was separate from English class. Therefore, I’ll need you to pardon the prepositional and grammatical stumbles caused by the game’s title. Good? Good.

What do you do in For Science!?

Players place cards next to cards, then blocks on top of other blocks, so some blocks touch other blocks, but other blocks can’t touch those blocks. After stacking the blocks, someone verifies all the proper shapes and colors are properly - and not improperly - touching the other shapes and colors. The reward for stacking blocks is puzzle pieces with pictures. Piece together the puzzle pieces to enclose enough pictures, and you win!

It’s confusing and stressful and chaotic and random, and that’s before you introduce the countdown clock! If you want it even confusinger and stressfuller and chaoticer and randomer, shorten the clock and introduce more events!

I’ve said too much. Also, not enough.

In For Science!, 1-6 lab workers cooperate to concoct the universal vaccine. To do so, players uses their unique abilities as they research designs for cures. Cures are built to match the blueprints constructed from design cards, each showing a series of blocks along one, two, or three strands…

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