That's What Jenni Said

I was so excited when Jamey Stegmaier’s Plans and Ploys   expansion for Tapestry   (published by Stonemaier Games) showed up in the mail. I’d  played a lot of Tapestry games with my social isolation pod (see my review for Tapestry   here ) over the summer and I was eager to explore the new Tapestry cards and civilizations promised in the expansion. Beyond these updates, the Plans and Ploys expansion also includes a new game element (Landmark cards), new space tiles, a handy bag for drawing exploration tiles, and landmark place marker tokens which offer an easy way to identify which landmarks have already been claimed just by looking at the central board. As soon as we unboxed Plans and Ploys , we invited a few of our friends over to give it a go. Our previous social isolation pod had disbanded with the spike in new COVID cases in our state (Iowa: ground zero for the pandemic once the fall semester of school started) and none of the members of our newly formed pod h...

It’s usually several months after a Stonemaier Games release before we pick the game up for our collection. By then, the flurry of strategy articles on the BGG forums have been written, the F.A.Q.s on the rules have been clarified, and the debate on where the game falls in the ranking of the entire Stonemaier catalogue is well underway. Tapestry , designed by Jamey Stegmaier (artwork by Andrew Bosley and Rom Brown), is no exception. The game was released in 2019 and arrived just a few months ago to our household. In Tapestry, each player takes control of a civilization and its capital city, and works to advance their civilization more adeptly than other players. It’s played over rounds (called eras in Tapestry )  but in a departure from many other games, players advance rounds independently of one another. I might be well into in my third era while you are still in your second. This is a bit different than Jamey’s other games where play might come to an abrupt end for everyone when...

At Gamicon , I was introduced to Sentient , from Renegade Game Studios. My friend Katie was manning the session and teaching interested attendees how to play, so with her encouragement, my husband Chris and I sat down and gave it a try. It was love at first play for me. That probably sounds a bit odd to those who know the game and who know me well because I often emphasize that theming is really important for me and Sentient’s theme is wholly unremarkable. Something about acquiring and programming bots …blah blah blah… but the theme quickly fades from memory as I begin to play and am pulled into the logic puzzle that is at the core of the game. Do you remember those logic puzzles wherein a group of friends go to a movie and a few facts are laid out about each person and where they sat and you have to figure out the precise order of their seating across the row of seats in the theatre? Sentient   feels a lot like that, but with beautiful pastel colors and striking custom dice and i...

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...

There are some games in my collection that I get excited about when they arrive at my house but it takes me months to get them to the table. Typically in these cases the artwork is lovely, the theme is interesting, and the mechanics look promising but there is something standing in the way of playing the game right away. For Triora: City of Witches (designed by Michael C. Alves) , what stood in the way is the game’s rulebook. It absolutely flummoxed me.  Even with the errata notes released a few months ago, it’s hard to make sense of the rules. It made a mess of things. And look what’s it’s done to my review – I usually like to start with a nice overview of a game’s theme, cover the components and artwork, and then dive into the gameplay.  But the rulebook is so awful in this case, I’m forced to lead with that. The publisher needs a skilled editor to rewrite the rulebook entirely. It’s laden with spelling errors and unclear language. So that’s the bad news; the rulebook is sub...

Deep Water Games provided me a review copy of Mystery of The Temples , an abstract area control game designed by Wei-Min Ling. It's one of three games in my collection from the Deep Water Games catalog that were originally published by EmperorS4 and feature artwork by Maisherly Chan ( Shadows in Kyoto and Hanamikoji are the other two). In Mystery of the Temples , players take on the role of adventurers on a quest to collect ancient runes protected by dark curses.  In order to break the curses, crystals must be collected and aligned. During game setup, five temple cards are arranged face up in a circle and two wilderness cards are placed in between each pair of temple cards (the picture below shows an alternative arrangement for a 2-player game). A stack of rune cards (4 cards per stack; these cards provide valuable crystal bonuses) are placed face down above each temple card and the top card in each stack is flipped face up. Temple objective cards are laid out; these cards provid...