I don’t enjoy failure, but I’ve come to believe that the best party games are the ones that constantly force you to fail. Just One is hard. Codenames can be crushingly difficult. In That’s Not a Hat!, failure is inevitable. Wavelength, Pan T’es Mort, Concept, I could go on. The specter of disaster looms. It often pummels you. Why do we play these, exactly?

I Know You Want It

Add to this fine tradition Broad Lines, a new cooperative party game from designer Piero Modolo and publisher Cranio Creations. Broad Lines seems to draw obvious inspiration from Just One, but instead of a word game, it applies the same general structure to Pictionary.

The active player, whomever that may be, draws a card and picks a number, which corresponds to a word. The goal of the group, it may not surprise you, is to get the active player to guess this word. The first player takes a square transparency and a dry erase marker, and draws one of two things: either a single curved line, or two straight lines. Once they’re done, the transparency gets placed on the provided easel, and the active player gets two guesses.

[caption id="attachment_294488" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Can you guess the word?[/caption]

Assuming they’re wrong, play continues…

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Give Us Victories (GUV) was released in 2022 by Italian game publisher Dissimula Edizioni.  It is the third game from designer Sergio Shiavi, whose previous offerings Radetzky’s March and From Salerno to Rome focus on conflicts that took place in Italy.  This time Sergio takes us to the U.S. Civil War with a game that is four games in one.

GUV is actually three games in one.  The “Main” game covers the 1863 Chancellorsville Campaign that saw the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) severely maul the Union Army of the Potomac (AoP).  Although the fighting resulted in the death of General “Stonewall” Jackson, Robert E. Lee’s victory at Chancellorsville emboldened him to invade the North, eventually leading to the Battle of Gettysburg.  GUV also includes a “Strategical” game and a “Tactical” game, as well as a solo game with AI.  My review focuses on the “Main” game.

Historical Context

Before getting to the game, let’s take a moment to review the overall situation preceding the Chancellorsville campaign.  In December 1862, then commander of the AoP, General Ambrose Burnside, launched a frontal assault on the fortified position known as Marye’s Heights just west of Fredericksburg, VA.  Fredericksburg is nearly equidistant between Washington D.C. and the Confederate capital of Richmond, VA.  Its…

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So Clover!, the new release from Repos Production and designer François Romain, is being marketed as a party game in the vein of Repos’ smash hit Just One. All the trappings of that wonderful game are present here; dry erase markers, player boards that double as white boards, and cards with keywords. The boxes are the same size, and the design schemes are similar yet distinct. Much like Just One, So Clover! is a cooperative game where players use word association to steer their comrades to the correct solution. There are some differences, of course.

So Clover! takes place over a single round. Each player draws four cards and covertly sets them in the four slots of their clover-shaped board. When placed in the slots, the cards, which are square with a hole in the middle and one word along each edge, create four pairs of random keywords. Players then have to write one clue for each pair on the edge of each clover leaf. For example, in my first game one of my pairs was “snow” and “chicken,” so I wrote “penguin.” In another, “hood” and “sponge” were united with “carwash.”

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Nerd Words Science is a word game where the words are about, you guessed it, science. Having a background in both science and words (although after reading this review, you might wonder if the latter is actually true), I was interested in giving it a try.

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How to Play Nerd Words

Depending on your player count, Nerd Words is played in 2 to 3 teams. During the game, you will either be giving clues for a science term, or working with your team to guess it in under a minute.

Giving clues

When you’re the clue giver you will be choosing a science term from your card and providing clues to get the other players to guess your term. Here’s the catch: the clues that you give have to start with a letter in your science term (but not the first letter). For example, if your term is “melting point”, maybe your first clue is “temperature”.

To give a clue the clue giver fills out their sheet, writing down both the number of words in their term, as well as a clue. Each time a clue is given they bet whether or not any team will correctly guess the term. These points will be lost or gained by the team that the clue giver is on

…

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For a lot of board gamers out there, we’ve got shelves full of games that we’ve picked up at places like Target or Barnes & Noble - each representing a different play style and different mechanics. The question is: where do you go next? If you like Game A, then what other game should you get to build upon that?

Now, if you’ve read any of our previous step ladder pieces, you’ll notice a progression of games from fairly standard and easy to progressively more obscure and more difficult. Today’s going to be a little different. Our first board game step ladders article was very well received and it sparked quite the discussion on Reddit. In that discussion, someone made the point that not only can one travel up a step ladder, but they can travel down it as well. So, today, we’re going to be starting at the top step and traveling backward. The reasons why will become clear. In today’s Step Ladder, the theme is wordplay.

If there’s one thing that we all share in common, it’s the necessity of communication and nothing gets the idea across so well as the right set of words. What we don’t all share in common is our lexiconic knowledge. Some of us are veritable dictionaries able…

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I’ve always loved word games.

Let me back up. I’ve always loved the idea of word games. I have fond memories of losing scrabble as a child, so I suppose that’s where this love/hate relationship began. When Words With Friends became the “new big thing” in 2009, I felt, tenfold, the wrath of my ability to suddenly forget every word I’d ever known.

I’ll just say it. I’m terrible at word games.

Sometimes word games make me feel like Erin Hannon.

The Office: Season 7, Episode 12. There are so many other great scrabble moments in that one!

Since the Words With Friends phenomenon has died down I’ve kept to longingly gazing at innovative new word games from a distance. With the exception of some extremely stressful rounds of Bananagrams here and there, I’ve mostly kept myself at arms length from this forbidden love.

Enter Wordsy.

Words, words, words…

A few weeks ago, Gil Hova, from Formal Ferret Games, was nice enough to send us over a Prototype copy of his newest game, Wordsy. After reviewing The Networks about a month ago, I was extremely excited to see what Gil had up his sleeve this time. To my surprise, he…

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