Category: Game Reviews

Bonanza

Bonanza is a collecting card game where you collect different bean cards. Every bean card you get earns you coins and the more coins you have the more likely you are to win. There are a few strategies to play with this game. You can collect more cards in order to get more coins, or you can continually trade in your cards for fewer coins more frequently. This is more of a play as you go and doesn’t require as much strategy. You can also trade your cards with other players to make the game more interesting.

Splendor

Splendor is a card game that allows you to collect gems and cards in order to gain 15 points to win the game. This game used gem tokens in order to purchase cards. Once you purchased cards you were able to get points for having different gems. Once you reach 15 points you win the game. This game uses strategy but requires you to be fluid in your thinking because there are other players that will get cards before you will. There’s different ways to get 15 points and it’s better to be open to all the gems rather than a select few.

Tsuro is a board game in which the players seek to be the last one standing on the road by adding new roads to travel in a way that avoids the edges of the board and by forcing other players to go off the board.

Munchkin Gloom is a card game in which players make their characters have the lowest self esteem possible by playing modifier cards to drop their esteem or to raise an opponent’s.

Sushi Go! is a card game in which players try to get the most points out of three rounds by putting one card down at a time and passing the rest of the deck to the person on their left until there isn’t anymore cards to pass.

Tokaido is a board game in which players try to get the most points by collecting cards and coins as you travel through the game.

Nanobot Battle Arena is a game where the goal is to finish the game with more nanobots in play than any other player. This is done by playing nanobots, and by using a hand of cards that contain different abilities. These powers include things such as permanently destroying enemy nanobots and laying down one or more of your own, or replacing an opponent’s with one of yours. The game ends when one player has no more nanobots to put into play.

The game is relatively easy to play, but the rules can be somewhat difficult to decipher through the rather long-winded rulebook. Each player can play one nanobot per turn and use one card per turn. The nanobots also have an affinity which affects the cards they play. If you’re red and you play a red card, it gains +1 effectiveness, but if you aren’t and you try to play a red card on red, it gets -1 effectiveness. This was poorly described in particular in the rules, and we were initially under the impression that each color could use these abilities once per turn without a card. This led to an entire game of green placing down two bots per turn, which almost certainly contributed to their (surprisingly) narrow victory.

Overall, however, once we did figure out how play worked, it was a surprisingly strategic game. In the end, it came to a tie between red and green, and green won thanks to the tiebreaker rule.

The goal of this game is to get the most nanobots and to sabotage your opponents nanobots. The card you pick at the beginning of the game dictates what “special power” you have throughout the game. The cards you play determine what move you can make. This is definitely a strategy game, although you can still play though using a “Safe way”. The goal is to cut off opponents chains to limit how many points they get. In this game, you don’t reach act 3 at the very end, but instead, you reach this act when you feel experienced and confident enough with the game and your strategy while playing.

Carcassonne is a tile-based German-style board game. Don’t ask me how to pronounce the game, lol. The goal of the game is to collect the most points by the number of cities and roads you own by the time the tiles run out. It look me awhile to get the hang of this game because the meaning of the pieces took time to remember. I enjoyed being able to place the tiles in mostly any way you wanted. Each time you play, the way the tiles are laid out will look different. There is a nice element of creativity to that. We played the easy version but it sounds like the longer version invites more of a story into it by using a dragon and a princess. I would revisit this game again even though I lost, lol.

For starters, this game is ironic because we are in a pandemic. The game has a board with a map of the world. Each player is given a role: Medic, Researcher, Scientist, Dispatcher, and Operational Expert. Each role had different skills and abilities. The goal of the game is to work with the other players to cure the pandemic. We were playing against the game itself. We lost. Different outbreaks of the disease would occur and once you get to 8 outbreaks, you lose the game.

I enjoyed this game because I do not remember the last time I played a game where you had to be collaborative with other players rather than competing against them. Another thing that helped me understand and play the game is, one player in our group knew how to play so he was able to explain the game in a more tangible way. Someone started reading the directions in our group. As different steps were read, other players began setting up the board. Also, the narrative/theme of the game was something that I could grasp. When games begin to become too abstract and something I cannot relate to, I begin to lose focus and understanding. I would play this game again.

Nanobot is a card game in which scientists fight to make the strongest chain of nanobots by building up nanobots into a chain and using cards to strengthen their chain or sabotage their opponent’s.

Pandemic is a co-operative board game where players try to stop the spread of four viruses by moving around the board and collecting cards.

Hanabi uses a regular deck of cards, but the twist is that you cannot see your hand of cards. Instead, everyone else can see your deck and as a team you must work together to “build” fireworks with less than 3 mistakes. Once you reach 3 mistakes a bomb goes off, and the game is over. As a team, you have to build 5 fireworks in correct sequence and color. This game heavily relies on teamwork, and without it, the game is impossible. This game also relies on honesty and integrity to follow the rules collectively. Overall, I liked this game since you never know what card your teammate may play, which always keeps you on your toes. To keep the game fair, its crucial to avoid “subtle” gestures hinting to other players what card they should lay, discard, etc.

Forbidden Island is a collaborative card game in which adventurers try to collect sacred treasures and escape the island before it sinks by collecting all of the sacred treasure cards and all of the adventurers making it to the helipad so they can make their escape.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a collaborative board game that requires the combined effort of all the players to cure all diseases using your avatars abilities, cards, tokens, and cooperation to win against the multiple ways to lose the game.

Forbidden Island is a card game where players collect treasure, flooding and unflooding tiles, while trying to fly off the island by picking cards and using teammates’ advantages to win.

Munchkin Gloom is a card game where players decrease their characters’ happiness and life while increasing other players’ happiness by picking cards and either following the action or reallocating the card(s).

Hanabi is a collaborative card game in which firework manufacturers create complete sets of fireworks by hinting to teammates what cards they have and from those hints blindly playing cards on the table.

Act 1: Rules are becoming clearer and with that the abilities to sabotage other players are becoming clearer. This is beginning to open up strategies for the game.

Act 2: One player has become the clear target for the next few rounds being up 2-0-0-0. I discovered it is better to go before a player you want out. It is much safer because once you mess someone you can get them out before they have a legitimate chance to. With the player who was up being targeted. It allowed everyone to catch up.

Act 3: Everyone by the final round was tied which made it interesting. There was no targeting of any specific player unless you had a vendetta. I drew the best card at the very beginning which sounds great, but actually is a problem. By this point everyone was comfortable with the stealing/peaking cards and the combo of peak and then steal or guess correct was a deadly one.