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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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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“Oh, did we get another Cold Case game? Can we break that out tonight?”

My wife and I play games on Friday nights, and on occasion, she walks into the game lair that is my 5’x5’ closet in the basement where all of the games live. I have a stack of review copies that I work through, mostly in order, and I had a Cold Case game on top along with a few much heavier options.

She loves a good murder mystery game. Anything co-op also means that she is in. Plus, we have already played the two 2021 entries in this line, A Story to Die For and A Pinch of Murder. (Cold Case games never seem to be about a kidnapping or blackmail situation that went unsolved…nope, somebody had to die.)

Cold Case: End of the Line is the newest entry from ThinkFun (makers of family brain games and puzzlers like Zingo 1-2-3 and the Escape the Room series). End of the Line features all the things you’d expect from a one-time-play gaming experience—ripped-from-the-headlines newspaper clippings, evidence photos, witness statements, and the like.

This format feels like it can never get old. But, the format should get harder.

[caption id="attachment_279255" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Yep, that's blood![/caption]

Murder, She…

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On the fields of fantastic realms. In the outer reaches of space. WWII and Feudal Japan. On tabletops and flat screens, gamers have fought a lot of wars. But as Galakta Games’ This War of Mine and its video game predecessor remind us, Not everyone in war is a soldier. Some don’t fight for glory. They fight just to survive.

The game puts you in the shoes of some of these non-soldiers, as you pass the time holed up in a collapsing squat, waiting for a ceasefire. Until then, you’ll spend your days crafting makeshift appliances, setting rat traps so there’s protein in your pantry, and combating the cold by burning wood that could have been a bed, or books that could have taken your mind off the misery. When night falls, you’ll send scavengers out to scrape up a meager handful of the supplies you need to survive the next day. If it’s not yet clear, This War of Mine is a bleak affair that earns every second of its 18-years-and-up maturity rating.

Based on a video game of the same name, play passes a bit like The Sims, where the characters you control have constant and shifting needs…

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