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A Gaming Life
Board Game Blitz – Wonderful boardgaming podcast
Podcasts are a great thing to listen to on your commute. And there are a plethora of great boardgaming podcasts if you are so inclined as to listen to them.
I wanted to highlight another great boardgaming podcast after my talking about the Dice Tower and Shut Up & Sit Down.
Board Game Blitz started just over a year ago (I should have posted this about a month ago when they did their 1-year anniversary episode), and it is a lot of fun to listen to. In addition, it’s relatively short, with all of them lasting about 30 minutes or so (one of the many ways that “Blitz” fits in the title).
In each bi-weekly episode, the three hosts (Crystal, Cassadi, and Ambie) discuss games that they’ve played recently.
Then they have a thematic segment where they either talk about games that match a certain theme or talk about a specific topic (the most recent episode talked about being a good winner or a good loser).
They then talk about the etymology of a word related to that episode (or just boardgame- related in some way). The most recent episode talked about the word “tie”, for example.
I believe Boardgame Blitz was the first boardgaming podcast hosted completely by women, though I could be wrong. And that is an important thing.
But it’s not why you should listen.
Race for the Galaxy App – Coming to Steam & Massive Update
I know I’m a bit behind. Sorry about that.
I’ve been too busy playing the Race for the Galaxy, from Temple Gates Games, app to actually write anything.
So consider this a couple of announcements that will make any fan of this game drool.
It’s coming out on Steam tomorrow, and it’s recently had a huge update that’s fixed almost every criticism I’ve had of it.
All in a span of two weeks. How can you go wrong with that?
Playing this on the computer, assuming it’s optimized for the higher resolution and screen size, will make this app even more beautiful, I would think.
Smash Up – Big in Japan coming in August
I saw a post on Boardgame Geek talking about the Big in Japan expansion for the card game Smash Up, and for some reason I thought it was talking about how the game itself is quite big in Japan.
I didn’t even realize that’s the new expansion!
After quickly realizing my mistake, I went to AEG’s web site and saw all the juicy information regarding the new expansion, supposedly coming in August. This includes a link to the rulebook, which is great (though the pictures of the cards have all the wording on them smashed together, so I hope they fix that)
It looks like a really excellent expansion, along the same lines as all the other ones, of course. Fans of the game will love it, I’m sure.
I’m still unsure about Smash Up myself.
Buying Games and Canada Post – a Rant
Being an avid boardgamer, I buy a lot of my games at online stores. The prices are usually great (especially on sale) and they just show up on your doorstep one day! Without you even having to put your clothes on!
How easy is that?
Most of the time, it’s very easy.
For the first time that I can remember in my boardgaming career, that feeling came to a screeching halt almost two weeks ago.
And in two weeks of dealing with Canada Post, this is a great video metaphor for the entire process of dealing with them.
How appropriate.
Here is my story.
Cities of Splendor expansion coming from Asmodee
Splendor is a relatively fast, pretty fun game about collecting gems and using those gems to buy more gems. It plays in about half an hour and is actually a joy to play (maybe because it’s one of the few games that it’s not surprising when I win).
It came out in 2014 from Space Cowboys and Asmodee and people have been wondering if there would ever be an expansion for it.
According to an Asmodee press release, that wait is finally over! You can stop holding your breath (and you, there, collapsed in the corner, should probably not have been holding your breath since 2014).
Cities of Splendor will be coming out later this year, and it actually includes four modular expansions for the game. I’m not 100% sure from the description whether you can play with all four at the same time or if you have to choose, but I would guess you can play with all of them.
What the expansions are is after the break.
How Important is Async Multiplayer in Your Boardgame App?
Readers of this blog know that I love mobile implementations of some of my favourite boardgames, even going so far as preferring the app version of some of them.
One of my favourite boardgame apps is Ascension, where I’ve logged just over 5000 multiplayer games, both asynchronous (with buddies all over the world) and synchronous (with my wife). It’s the most beautiful solution because it gives you a choice of how you want to play.
Asynchronous multiplayer is very important to me as an app user, because many of my boardgaming friends don’t live near me. They live in different time zones, sometimes even half-way around the world.
Real-time (Synchronous multiplayer is often called that) multiplayer just doesn’t work for me very often. It certainly doesn’t work for gaming with my buddies, though I occasionally do play real-time games of Ticket to Ride with opponents who are in the lobby of that app.
How important is asynchronous multiplayer to you, as an app user?
Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate Announced by Wizards of the Coast
On June 3, 2017, Wizards of the Coast announced a new game coming out later this year.
Have you ever played Betrayal at House on the Hill? This is a game that starts out cooperative as players explore a building that is haunted in some way. Once certain circumstances are met, one of the players becomes the villain and a random scenario comes into play where the that player is trying to accomplish something (build a gate to destroy the world, kill all the other players, or whatever) and the others are trying to stop him/her.
The original game came out a while back and an expansion came out last year.
Now, Wizards is reskinning the game and setting it in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate will have players exploring the dark alleys and deadly catacombs of this city located int he Forgotten Realms. You are all adventurers seeking out…well, adventure. But then something happens (maybe a Mind Flayer takes one of the characters over, or maybe one of them just decides he doesn’t like the others) and it becomes a one versus many game!
The game will include 50 scenarios so the replayability of the game should be sky-high.
I’ve only played the original Betrayal game once and it was a lot of fun. However, it could be horribly unbalanced depending on when the change occurred and where everybody was. Also, from what I’ve heard, the original (as well as last year’s expansion) is riddled with errors, so I’m hoping they clean it up a bit for this new version.
It’s definitely an intriguing concept, though, and I hope that it is as good as it sounds like it could be.
I definitely want to play it once it shows up.
The game is due out on October 6, 2017 (we’ll see if they meet that date).
Review – San Juan (2nd Edition)
There’s nothing like the Caribbean sun, I’m sure (I’ve never been down there, unfortunately). I know it gets really hot down there, especially when you’re working out in the streets or in the fields, building markets or working the indigo plants. Maybe you are building some statue to some long-honoured military general?
Of course, you aren’t actually out there doing all that stuff. You’re organizing it all, directing traffic, and having others build all of that for you. Still, watching them work while you’re sipping lemonade can be…ok, it can be peaceful. But you might start feeling bad for the workers!
So why not do it all in cards instead? That saves a lot of the hard work involved. And the messy sweat. Now everybody can drink lemonade with you! Or rum, if you like (though maybe that’s more of a Jamaica thing)
You can do all this by playing San Juan (2nd Edition), the card game designed by Andreas Seyfarth, with art by Harald Lieske and Mia Steingräber, published by Alea & Ravensburger. Based on the board game Puerto Rico, it does have some similar mechanisms to its parent game.
But it’s so much more fun, at least for me.
The Fantastic Four returns to Marvel Legendary!
I’m a big Marvel Legendary fan. Between enjoying the Marvel comics of my youth and then some awesome deck-building action, I’ve bought all of the expansions until the last one (I’m running out of room!) and it just feels so cool.
One of the small-box expansions that came out early in the Legendary list of expansions is the Fantastic Four expansion. Of course, these are required characters, as they are almost the first family of modern era Marvel Comics.
Then rights issues hit, in the sense that Marvel Comics had sold movie rights to the Fantastic Four to the Fox movie studio and there have been issues involved in Marvel not wanting to do anything with them. They prevented Upper Deck Entertainment from reprinting the expansion once it sold out, causing secondhand copies of it to go for $200+.
That has now changed.
Raiders of the North Sea – Renegade Games
One bit of news came out while I was gone last week that got me a little excited.
Yesterday’s “New to Me – May 2017” post included my play of Jorvik, a viking game about settling northern England.
There seems to be a bunch of Viking games coming out over the last couple of years, some more enticing than others to me (or one that looks interesting but a friend of mine is already buying it so I’m not going to bother).
One that looked kind of interesting, but I discovered that it really wasn’t widely available around these parts (and not in English, apparently), was Raiders of the North Sea, a worker placement game where you are collecting resources and building up your crews so you can raid villages to get treasure and more resources.
The surprising news came out that Renegade Game Studios is going to be publishing Raiders of the North Sea in English for the first time.
Also according to Dice Tower News, both English-language expansions will be coming out as well.
This game has been nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres (German expert game of the year) for 2017, which is certainly noteworthy.
According to Renegade, the game itself will be available sometime this Summer with the expansions coming in the Fall.
I can’t wait!
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