Author: Jason
I am going to change format a bit here. I will not give a general intro to The Captain is Dead by JT Smith and Joe Price, published by AEG. Instead, I want to set the scene by addressing a criticism of the game echoed by, among others, Ronny over at Co-Op Board Gamers (which, by the way, is a great site which you should go visit immediately after finishing this review). He admitted that he wasn’t jazzed about this game at first because it was “very similar to Pandemic”. When I hear that a game evokes Pandemic so strongly,…
CMON is at it again. Zombicide: Green Horde has laid claim to our wallets, coming hot on the heels of a $4.2 million campaign for Rising Sun earlier in the year, a $3.6 campaign for Massive Darkness last June, and… well, you get the idea. CMON has used Kickstarter to grow exponentially over the last few years. With healthy kickstarters, a (mostly) happy community, and Eric Lang in full-time tow, CMON represents a real success story in the gaming industry. All would be well and good, except for two magic words that appear in all of their projects: Just to look at the…
Airships! Steampunk! Woohoo! Zephyr: Winds of Change is a 1-5p cooperative game designed by Joe Mietling and Aaron Kluck, published by Portal Dragon Games. In the game, players pilot airships into dangerous territory, fighting increasingly long odds and dastardly opponents. If you are skilled enough, you’ll face off in an epic aerial dogfight with an evil Warlord of the skies!! I get pumped just writing about it. Do yourself a favor and put Beethoven’s 9th Symphony on in the background while you read this review. You know, to get you in the proper mood. How to play Zephyr: Winds of Change When…
One of my favorite podcasts is Board Games Insider. I love it. New episodes of that show leap to the front of my (very long) podcast queue whenever they drop. If you don’t know it, Ignacy Trzewiczek of Portal Games and Stephen Buonocore of Stronghold Games talk shop about insider stuff – publishing, distributing, pricing, etc. Stephen said something in the last episode, though, that made my ears perk up. They were talking about CMON and Iello adopting the Minimum Advertised Pricing Policy (MAPP) that Asmodee adopted over a year ago. Basically, those companies are telling stores and other game sellers that…
Since I started playing board games as my main hobby a few years ago, I’ve ranked every game I’ve played on BGG. It’s kind of a fun thing to do. Thanks to the wonders of technology, it takes mere seconds to load up the the BGG site on my phone and record my rating right after I finish playing a game (or sometimes during a game – yes, I am sometimes that guy with my phone out during play). What? I rank games right after I play them? I justify rating a game so quickly, sometimes after only half a…
You might have have noticed that, if you are a fan of cooperative fantasy adventure games, you aren’t exactly starved for choices. Sometimes it feels like a game company, in order to really call itself a game company, has to have at least one of these in their game catalogue. It’s great for fans of the genre, of which I am certainly one! However, because of the glut, a game would have to do a lot in order to stand out from the pack. Of Dreams and Shadows, designed by Gordon Alford and published by Greenbrier Games earlier this year,…