Shifting Realms is underrated. Designed by Craig and Jeff Van Ness, this Soaring Rhino title is a somewhat light weight Euro-style design of gathering resources and turning those resources into buildings, albeit with a pretty significant twist; the board is comprised of three randomized realms each boasting unique rules, player driven story events, and their…
Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game came out in 2008, a lifetime in cardboard years, and we’re still looking for a quality successor that can play in a fraktion of the time. Dark Moon came close. The Menace Among Us lands just a bit closer. It’s difficult to shake comparisons when discussing this genre. The trick to nailing this concept is…
I like to beat around the bush as much as Moses, but let’s not delay the pain: some games are simply not worthy. This is fine. I assure you, we’re all going to be okay. Terror Below can hide underground all it wants, but its lumpy exterior and malodorous excretions are clear as the Nevada sky.…
A couple of years ago Wizkids released a little card game that was better than it had any right to be. Fantasy Realms was a stunner. It offered contemplative strategy, a gripping pace, and an expansive content base that saw play vary considerably session to session. This was all accomplished with 53 cards. I was a little…
This is a game where you get to play a dead girl stuffed into a box. You lurk in an abandoned mansion moving hiding place to hiding place and giggling as you go. Those other people at the table are stuck in your house, doing their damnedest to get the hell out before being devoured.…
Sometimes I come across a game and I just want to shove it into a cannon and blast it into my body. Yeah, that’s somewhat disturbing, which precisely fits the scene as I’m riffing on Cryptic Explorers, a game that’s black, white, and terrifying. This is another one of those Kickstarter preview things. I don’t plan on…
Kane Klenko is an interesting fellow. Known for his titles such as Fuse and Flip Ships, his brand comes across as “quirky”. Proving Grounds is right in that pocket. This is a real-time gladiatorial bout where one player embodies a betrayed princess and the others never show up. That’s right, this is a table for one and a design specifically…
If I was going to design a Crusader Kings board game, this would not be it. There’s a certain level of profusion I’d expect from a work derived from the massively complex PC simulation. The video game is full of rigor and depth, demanding many hours of input before you’re simply comfortable and many more before you’ve…
Brutal and cute are two words you don’t often see together. Perhaps when some weirdo is talking about Harley Quinn, or when my five year old lays a sick burn on her daddy-o, and maybe when we’re talking about Slide Quest. This fresh release from Blue Orange Games is every bit brutal and every bit cute.…
Sean Sweigart, Aaron Dill, and John Kovaleski are the three men behind some of the best thematic games of the past decade. They brought us Spartacus, Sons of Anarchy, and Star Trek: Ascendancy, among others. These are some of my favorite titles and still see regular play. That was before. Sean sadly passed away in 2016 and it…
