That's What Jenni Said

I had the opportunity to play a preview edition of Quests & Cannons: The Risen Islands   from Short Hop Games in advance of the game’s upcoming Kickstarter campaign. Designed by Eric and Shannon Geller, the preview edition arrived in a bright and colorful cover box that hinted at the beautiful artwork within. We got it on the table for a family game straightaway. As we unpacked the contents of the box, I was impressed with the quality of the wooden components. Especially for a preview copy, everything was incredibly well made and sturdy, which speaks to the care and enthusiasm Eric and Shannon have put into the game. The illustrations on the components are just lovely! The artists (Lily Yao Lu, Tony Carter, Regis Torres, Sita Duncan, and Lilia Sitailo) did a really great job integrating the theme into the materials.  Quests & Cannons   is very easy to setup and the rules are straightforward,  so you can get started playing pretty quickly; no one is going ...

I don't keep my finger on the pulse of all the independent Kickstarter campaigns running at any given time. There's just too much unique content being produced month after month for me to sift through everything. I leave that to those who write previews and reviews for a living (I am an IT Consultant for a living; I write reviews as a hobby because I'm passionate about board gaming). The only way an independent Kickstarter campaign is going to be on my radar is if the designer/publisher reaches out to me to let me know the campaign is running or if it's created a bit of buzz already in the key circles that I frequent. I definitely wasn't closely monitoring Kickstarter campaigns four years ago when the original edition of Middara   was initially funded. It was an adventurous dungeon crawl that promised to be so much more than an ordinary dungeon crawl. With options to run in campaign mode for an ongoing narrative or crawl mode for one off gameplay, it could work as a...

I love a good area control game. I'm crazy about Islebound , Scythe , Spirit Island , Blood Rage , Forbidden Stars , Vindication , Fate of the Elder Gods , and Twlight Imperium IV (my FAVORITE game outside of Brass Birmingham ).  So I had high hopes for Kemet . It’s an older game (released in 2012), designed by Jacques Bariot and Guillaume Montiage and it’s been on my wishlist since I started playing board games at a neighborhood gaming store about a year after its release. My best friend and I would be at the store playing whatever new game we’d bought that month, and I’d admire the Kemet cover art from where I sat. It just looks absolutely thrilling. Because we were heavily into the cult of the new at that time, we never prioritized adding an older game like Kemet to our collection. This was finally rectified when Matagot sent me a review copy.  I was so excited to open the box, especially when I discovered the artwork on the inside was just as well illustrated as the bo...