Game: Fairy Tale Inn
Designer: Remo Conzadori, Paolo Mori
Year: 2021
Game: Fairy Tale Inn
Designer: Remo Conzadori, Paolo Mori
Year: 2021
Game: Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods
Game: It's a Wonderful World:
Designer: Frédéric Guérard
Year: 2020
Game: It's a Wonderful World: Corruption & Ascension
Designer: Frédéric Guérard
Year: 2020
It's a Wonderful World is a 2019 engine building game which has you draft and build cards in order to create an efficient dystopia capable of making bigger and better projects and attracting the bravest and brightest to your shores. Corruption and Ascension serves as a 'Bigger and Better' expansion, with new cards that produce humongous amounts of resources and points, assuming you can afford the damn things! Should your budget be more limited then you might want to veer more towards the corruption side of things, these cards tend to be far cheaper to produce, but some of the more crooked people involved might happen to wander off with some of your existing resources. You weren't using that anyway right?
A brief explanation of the base game: Every round each player will be given a hand of cards. From this they choose one to keep and pass the rest on. This repeats until everyone has seven cards, at this point each player can decide which to try and build and which to throw away for resources. Then each player's base will generate the five resources of the game, with a bonus token going to the player making the most in each category. This continues for four rounds at which point the game ends. Corruption and Ascension adds a new deck of cards from which players add a number of cards to their card pool for the draft. This gives them more options, including the new cards which either have ways to altar your production both positively and negatively, gain huge production boosts at huge costs, or tremendous end game points with ridiculous construction requirements.
March 23rd 2021 marked the 1 year anniversary of when the UK first went into national lockdown. We've had some brief phases of less strict rules during that time, but mostly it feels like we've not seen anyone, or got together and played games for a year at this point. At the start of the pandemic I had energy and enthusiasm which I channeled into coming up with creative ways to continue to get my physical board games to the table by playing with friends over Skype. For many weeks, I posted weekly blogs, sharing ideas for which games play well online. Over the course of a year, my enthusiasm has definitely diminished, but I am still trying to keep a regular meetup for Skype gaming with one friend and by co-workers.
Here's some highlights of the best online gaming successes we've had in the past few months!
Game: Photosynthesis: Under the Moonlight
Game: Bandido
Game: Dive
Game: Kombo Klash
Game: Deckscape: Escape from Alcatraz
Game: Holi: Festival of Colors
Designer: Julio E. Nazario
Year: 2020
Game: Holi: Festival of Colors
Designer: Julio E. Nazario
Year: 2020
Game: Three Sisters
Game: Cloud City
Game: Buru
Game: Heart of Crown: Fairy Garden
Game: SINS: Gloom of Greed
Game: Tawantinsuyu: The Inca Empire
Game: 1565, St. Elmo's Pay
Game: Tiny Towns: Villagers
Designer: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood
Year: 2020
Game: Tiny Towns: Villagers
Designer: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood
Year: 2020
Tiny Towns: Villagers is the second expansion for the resource puzzle/town builder Tiny Towns. While the first expansion added the concept on money to the game, this expansion adds people to live in your town. Animal people, in the form of cute hedgehog, mouse, and squirrel meeples. In addition to these cute new locals there is the usual selection of new building cards and monuments to further deepen the available strategies in this cube-laden puzzle.At the start of a game of Tiny Towns: Villagers you'll shuffle and deal out one building card for each building type as normal. You'll then place out two villager cards, one with a low cost and one with a high cost. These villager cards define what the villagers can do in this game. The game will then play much as normal with players taking turns to name a resource, each player taking a cube of that resource adding it to their board. Once they have made a pattern as defined on the building cards they can replace all those cubes with a building token built in one of the spaces that the cubes were removed from. The game will continue like this until there are no spaces left on anyone's board at which point you'll earn the points for all your buildings, minus points for spaces on your board without a building on it.