Board Game Reviews, News, and More
I’ll be honest, I’m often not a fan of games that present one puzzle after another to progress, especially if the games are long. What can make that enjoyable to me is a great story. The Escape Tales series by Board&Dice promises to do just that, in the form of an escape room game that … Read more
The first time I became aware of Tidal Blades: Heroes of the Reef was when I saw an ad for its upcoming Kickstarter on Facebook. It immediately caught my eye with its beautiful blue ocean scenery and vibrant character designs. I excitedly waited for the game to hit Kickstarter, skimmed over the campaign page, and … Read more
The animals are gathering for the Klash to test their might against each other! This whimsical setting informs the game’s art, which is full of fierce-looking anthropomorphic animals decked out in armor. That is where the theme starts and ends. Make no mistake; this is a purely abstract board game. You won’t feel like you … Read more
I have a personal pet peeve with most tabletop racing games. More often than not, they don’t feel like a race. They may emulate the pattern or the environment, but a race would rarely offer truly tense moments of position changes or upsets. While a racing game will give you plenty of opportunities to take … Read more
Agriculture is a pervasive theme in board gaming, with titles such as Agricola and Viticulture often topping lists of the best board games. There’s something incredibly appropriate about it as a board game theme—the slow but rewarding development of crops over time, the logistics of land management, and economics of resources and labor. So from the … Read more
Across countless stories, dragons are described as having an uncontrollable desire to hoard wealth. Little time is given to how dragons learned that behavior, but in the family game Baby Dragon Bedtime there may be an answer. You play as baby dragons whose mother has told them it’s time for bed. You have to get … Read more
Early on in my experience with the board gaming hobby, I came across the app version of a physical deck-building game on my phone. That game was Ascension, and it truly captivated me. I’d never played anything like it before. It perfectly mixed the delight of random card draws while simultaneously mitigating that randomness by … Read more
During the excitement and revelry of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, something sinister was happening. A man calling himself H. H. Holmes began building a hotel. He would hire and fire contractors and construction workers quickly, so no one but he would know the hotel’s full layout. It was full of doors leading nowhere, … Read more
After Dominion arrived on the tabletop scene in 2008, the mechanic of deck-building started appearing everywhere, sometimes with original IPs, and sometimes with a popular license attached. Since that time, deck-building has often gone from being the sole mechanic in a game to one mechanic amongst many. Cowboy Bebop: Space Serenade is in many ways … Read more
The roll and write genre has grown in popularity over the last few years, producing some truly fantastic games such as Cartographers, Welcome To, That’s Pretty Clever, and many more. All of these games have several things in common: you draft some dice (or cards), fill out a sheet using a pen or marker-based on … Read more