I Need This Board Game...

For the review of the tabletop version, see here: Review #9: Castles of Mad King Ludwig Price:  $8.99 CAD Rating: 9.5* Castles of Mad King Ludwig is an amazing game, one of my favorites, but it is a tile placement game with pieces that vary in shape significantly and also have a lot of interactions. Would it be possible to pull off in an app? How well would the setting of prices by the master builder be pulled off? I was about to be very impressed. There are several different play options available. As with all good digital implementations, there is a progression tutorial to help teach players the controls and how to play. There is then a local match that can be played against other players on the same device or against AI. Finally, once you complete the tutorial it is replaced with a campaign mode. The app implements the gameplay of this seemingly complex spacial game very well. For placing the tiles, it is very easy to see how things will line up, move til...

Again, I was super busy and not able to complete my February list in time for the end of the month, so I will try to shuffle the way I do things in the future to try to get April done in time! The Quacks of Quedlinberg: The Herb Witches Quacks of Quedlinberg quickly became one of my most anticipated games once I played and thoroughly enjoyed Ganz Schon Clever. I recently played it and it is everything it was hyped up to be, making me very excited for this expansion. Corinth The big Days of Wonder release this year is a roll-and-write! This truly is the age of the roll-and-write. Based on the company's track record, it is likely that this will be one of the most well-produced roll-and-write games made to date. Tuki The next big game from the makers of the popular gateway games Azul and Reef, this one follows the same four-letter naming convention and instead of laying tiles down on a grid, you will be building up patterns vertically. It looks like they are about to...

# of Players:  2-5 Playtime: 2-3 Hours Core Mechanic: Action Selection Theme:  Fantasy Type: Euro Weight: Heavy Year:  2012 Rating: 10* When this game was first released, I took notice as everyone was saying how great it was and it shot quickly up the BGG rankings. However, even though it was on the edge of my radar, it kept getting buried under other new releases and I never felt the urge to go out of my way to get a copy of this and play it. Five years after it was released, the app version came out.  I downloaded it right away because of its high BGG ranking at the time (#4) and played through the tutorial. Maybe it was just me, but I was extremely confused and overwhelmed. But I was determined to play this game so I downloaded the rules and read through it. There are a lot of rules. The game is played over six rounds. At the start of each round is an income phase where each player receives resources based on structures built, favour ...

# of Players:  2-6 Playtime:  0-30 Minutes Core Mechanic: Bluffing Theme:  Dystopian Type:  Party Weight:  Light-Med Year:  2012 Rating: 7.5* I'm not sure why, but Coup went unnoticed by me when it was first released. This game is set in the universe of The Resistance, a game I love and will eventually review, but still that wasn't enough to encourage further exploration. However, the app version of the game was eventually released and although it took some time for me to understand how to play, I saw the promise of the game and picked up a physical copy. And this would be another game that I am completely terrible at. The object of the game is to be the last player standing. Each player starts with two influence cards face down in front of them along with some money and there is a pile of leftover influence cards in the middle of the table. Going around the table in clockwise order, each player can take one of seven actions. T...

With all the new games that I was able to play this year along with all the new games that were released, my list of games that I want to play certainly would have changed. Although I never posted my 2018 Top 100 Games I Want to Play list, I did make a list (I am posting this year's however). Similar to the games that permanently dropped out of my Top 150 Games of All-Time, there were 11 games that permanently dropped out of my Top 150 Games I Want to Play and I thought I would put together a short post to discuss these games. The Princes of Florence (January 2018 - #69) The reason this game had been ranked so high is that it came out nearly 20 years ago and is still in the Top 150 on BoardGameGeek - quite a feat especially considering the cult of the new that affects most games today.  Back in 2007, this game had peaked at #7. But other than that, I do not know much about this game which is why it has dropped off. Cult of the New. Mafia de Cuba (January 2018 - #73) A cou...

# of Players:  2-5 Playtime:  30-60 Minutes Core Mechanic:  Network Building/Set Collection Theme:  Trains Type: Family Euro Weight:  Light-Med Year:  2005 Rating: 8.0* I really wasn't sure how to review Ticket to Ride: Europe (TtR: Europe) - as a new game, or standalone expansion, or combined with all the other expansions in a mini-review format? In the end, I decided to do this as an expansion review because the core game remains the same with a few tweaks and we will see if there is enough content to fill out a full expansion review or if I need to convert this to a mini-review. For starters, TtR: Europe is definitely a step-up in terms of complexity. But is that good or bad for this gateway level game? For how to play the core game, please take a look at the original review for  Ticket to Ride . TtR: Europe adds three new things - ferries, tunnels and train stations. Building a train station is a new action that can be tak...

I played 113 new games this past year. That means that a good chunk of them were bound to break into my Top 100 Games of All-Time list, and indeed 42 of them did, meaning that 42 games were knocked out of my Top 100. However, I will be releasing a list of my Top 101-150 games and some of these are still on there, so in this post I will be writing about the 19 games that dropped permanently off my rankings all the way out of the Top 100 and why they have done so. Twilight Imperium (January 2018 - #13) I mentioned in the other article that I decided with the new edition being released, me never having completed a game, and it being so long since my last partial game that it no longer qualified as a game I have played. This instantly means that it jumped up to near the top of my Want to Play list and in no way does it signify that the game has dropped for me, because from what I have played I think it could easily be in my Top 10. San Juan (January 2018 - #58) At one point in ti...