I was on vacation with my partner last week and we packed the card game version of Café International

The board game version is from 1989 and I was extremely nostalgic about the game, as it was one that I used to play a lot when I visited my grandparents back when I was a young kid.

After playing two round of it we realized: This is and OLD game, and it shows. Even the card game version from 2001 shows it’s age in both the ridiculous artwork as well as the game mechanics like drawing/discarding cards for minutes without any change to the board state.

We chose to leave it in the hotel lobby. Maybe it will bring joy to someone there, it brought no joy to us other than a short flash of nostalgia, so we decided we’ll never play it again.

Finally I had the time to play the new games we got at the Spiel

Arborea - 3 this week, 4 games in total. Played with 2 and 4 players. I am so glad I backed it. The mechanics of the game are pretty unique in my collection. Putting workers in but not immediately activating them and hoping they will be pushed further until it is your turn again is exciting and interesting player interaction. The shared resources I like most. I like the idea to produce and if you can’t or don’t want to use them the player is rewarded with points. The owls seem very powerful, hard to get but work nicely if you have your gift set-up up and running. I haven’t tested the rule cards yet, but they could add a little twist to the game. The midnight expansion is cool, need to use the fish more next time.

Satori - from a score board of over 300 we come to max. 40 points. It is cute, shared workers with few possibilities and each time you do a combo you feel like a pro. I like that you can annoy your opponents with evil moves. With 2 players the board is a little bit restricted. Would like to test with more players.

Eleven - well. I am not into sports, the flavour seems nice. The game play is meh, in my opinion. The matches are too fiddly in my opinion. An overlay for the cards with markers to show if a goal was scored would be nice.

Witcher the old world retail edition - I do like the card combo effect. The little links to do combo attacks. The flavour text is loosely webbed into the game. The text reads nicely (German edition). Player dice poker against the other players is like real gambling and as far as I know there is no way to cheat (yet). The end came a bit sudden (2 players). Would like to test with more players.

Drums of war - what a downer. I either don’t understand the game or it really is a lame game. Didn’t like it. Art work is okish.

Bite - cute quick game with high value double sided paper tokens. Easy to learn. Hard to master. A good small game.

We have settled a bit more and had the chance to whip out some games: We played one game each of Ark Nova and Castles of Burgundy with two players. I think these two games are our current two-player favorites and it does not feel like something is left out when playing it (unlike some other games for more than two players).

We also played two 4-player session of Clank!: Catacombs - I love it more and more, maybe not with two players but with 3+ its great fun. It can be more deadly than the first and I enjoy this. Depending on the explored dungeon, the exit might be very easy or really hard. I like that a lot. Dungeon crawling, deckbuilding, exploration, interesting decision and fun mechanisms.

And last but not least is Amritsar - it was all our first time playing but our host was very well prepared and guided us through the beginning. We were 4 players and the game combines a few different mechanics like those found in 5-Tribes. While the game is interesting, it did not click with me. It was fun playing it but I dont think I would choose it again as a game on the table.

When we have the time it’s Funkenschlag (Power Grid)
Otherwise it was mostly Bang! or Scout

It was a week of lighter games for us this week.

We started with 2 plays of Tsuro with 6 players, each of which resulted in 3 players winning! We were surprised how avoidant of conflict most of us were in this.

Secondly, we then played a game of Roll for It! to see the night out. I’ve never played this, but really felt like it needed some rerolls as in Yahtzee or Poker Dice. I spent far too many rounds rolling 1 die waiting for my number to come up only to have to wait for 5 other players to do their thing!

Still just been playing Lorcana mostly. I did play a round of Root on Table Top Sim with a friend. It was my first time using TTS, but it wasn’t too difficult to pick up. Will definitely be trying more games with it.

We did Cthulhu DMD, zoo Vadis, and voidfall. Zoo Vadis was not for me, the game basically forces you to negotiate and people never want to help me out. Voidfall continues to be fucking amazing!

We played Camel Up! The Card Game with a friend over the weekend. It was a lot of fun! Making bets and trying to predict how the camels are going to move without knowing which cards your opponents put in the race deck for that leg was a good time and almost made me understand the appeal of real gambling 😂

We gifted The Isle Of Cats to a friend and had a go. Cute game, with card drafting, self imposed rule shenannigans and tetris puzzling cats onto your boat. Can recommend.

Had a little October/Halloween themed night and played a handful of rounds of Mysterium, followed by Obscurio.

I lost every game 🙃

3 plays of Golem. It’s been a while so the first game needed a rules refresher but the following two went quite smoothly.

The golem tracks are a neat version of track-based income. Each round you have to distribute a certain amount of forward movement between your golems and their positions after this determine the type of actions they can trigger. They can also get out of control if you are not careful, you have various ways to deal with that.

The game also uses a version of stacked tableau building similar to how it works in Deus (or Lorenzo and Wingspan to some extent). Oh and I love the marble based action selection! It’s sort of like a smoother version of Grand Austria Hotel’s dice drafting. Overall it’s a cool game that is held back a bit by its graphic design.

We also played some Gingerbread House and Knarr, both are smooth comfort games for us.

Munchkin!

Carcassonne, a classic!

Easy rules and therfore fun! (: We’ve played with two extra extension which I don’t know how to translate.