Author: Anthony

Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game allows you to build a roster of your favorite Marvel super heroes, save innocents from villainous goons, and face off with the likes of Dr. Doom, Magneto, Loki, and many other… well… legendary bad guys. The game feels a bit like they wanted to make a board game version of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, a fun co-op video game that came out a few years ago. The results are mostly fun, but the game has a few odd design choices that kept me from loving it like I was hoping I would. Legendary is played…

I like iconography, I really do. The non-standard hieroglyphs at the heart of some of the most replayable board games on the market today are fun to learn and even more fun to master, but they also represent one of the steepest barriers to entry in gaming. Guilds of London is such a game, and the steepness of that curve very nearly stifles what is otherwise an intelligent, fun game. Tasked with placing your liverymen in specific guilds, graduating them to the status of master, and building influence over the immense and incredibly powerful order of guilds in late medieval…

It’s that time of the week again! Table for One is back with Episode 5. This week I’m talking about one of the games I’ve been getting to the table a lot lately – Guilds of London. I look at the game’s official solo variant rules and how it compares to the base game, as well as some of the specific things I like and dislike about this version compared to the multiplayer version. In the second segment, I discuss some of the dexterity games I enjoy playing to unwind at the end of a long game, and how these…

Pandemic Legacy isn’t my first experience with a legacy game. Most people familiar with the genre probably played a legacy version of Risk. It’s intriguing, the idea of having a progressing game world where a region of the map can be wiped out, forever influencing games in the future. But the pessimist in me remembers my frustrating experience with Descent, a game I wish to never play again. Descent shares many features that have me intrigued by Pandemic Legacy. Although Descent had some cool RPG systems that made upgrading your hero a cool process, but there were just too many…

A couple years ago, I played an old out of print game with friends as a warmup to a long game day. It was quick, accessible, and a lot of fun. The game, Medici, was one of Reiner Knizia’s finest games, but also one of his many out of print titles and I was unwilling to spend $60+ on a game with admittedly awful graphic design and a 30 minute play time. Fast forward two years and Grail Games is bringing Medici back in a beautiful updated package with illustration by Vincent Dutrait. Suffice it to say, I jumped on…

Welcome back everyone! After a bit of a delay, Episode 4 of Table for One is here and I have three exciting games to talk about, plus some thoughts on board game apps as a whole. First on tap is recent play throughs, including the long awaited Star Trek: Frontiers which has been sitting on my table for a while waiting for a play through. Is it worth tracking down if you already own or have thoroughly played Mage Knight? Next up I discuss Mansions of Madness Second Edition, almost certainly not for the first time, and finally I dig…

Codenames is one of the hottest games of the last year. Winner of the Spiel des’Jahres, the Origins Game of the Year, and countless other awards, it’s on a bit of a roll, so we figured we’d dig in and make some recommendations for other games you might like if you happen to love this one. In addition, we’re talking about some of the games we’ve been playing lately, our big acquisition disorders, and Daniel is back! Shout it from the Tabletop This month, we have a lot of news to discuss including the big Games Workshop/FFG divorce (it’s not…

One of a handful of new releases at Gen Con this year for Cryptozoic, Mad Science Foundation, designed by Sharang Biswas and Max Seidman, is a straightforward set collection and drafting game with a bit of variable powers mixed in for good measure. It’s on the lighter end of the spectrum, and despite the size of the box (which we’ll get to), it’s small, short, and easy to setup and learn. Thematically speaking, I like it. There really aren’t that many games in this genre – not that it’s a massive genre to draw from, but it’s still a fun…

The Manhattan Project is a fantastic, well-balanced worker placement game that is often overlooked, largely because of theme. While gamers are more than content to slay orcs, Nazis, undead ghouls, and everything in between – it gets a little too real when discussing the most dangerous object in the actual real world. But the game is brilliant and if you can get it to the table, you should. For those that have trouble getting it out, or are looking for a quicker solo experience, Minion Games recently released The Manhattan Project Chain Reaction, a small box card game that takes…

Another week, another batch of solo games hitting the table! This week, I’m digging into a question that has been posted a handful of times on Twitter and Facebook – how do you handle games with long setup or breakdown times? Before diving into that, I offer some thoughts on the recent Games Workshop/FFG split and which games are worth tracking down that will be affected (as well as the ones that might come back in a new form). I also share one of the long awaited expansions that finally went back into print. For recent plays, I dive into…