Review: Tokyo Highway

Daren Hutton11 comments

Number of players: 2-4
Playing Time: 30-50mins
Age: 8+

Tokyo Highway is a dexterity game where players are creating roadways to place their cars on. The winner of the game is the first player to place all their cars.

During the game, players create columns and of different heights and places a road section. If any road section passes under or over an existing road you can place one of your cars on the newly placed road (if the new road passes both over and under an existing road you can place two cars).  Be careful though, as the game carries on the playing area becomes a chaotic jumble of roads, columns and cars and there are penalties if you knock any of the highways over. This means that placing your roads and cars can become extremely tense and often hilarious, you’ll need a steady hand (with a little help from the tweezers included in the game) to win Tokyo Highway.


Tokyo Highway is an excellent game that is amazingly simple. It plays like Jenga or Buckaroo but with more depth and strategy. The simplicity makes Tokyo Highway the perfect game for children and you’ll have hours of fun creating your own Spaghetti Junction on the tabletop.


Dexterity Game
Easy to Learn
Child Friendly
Competitive

You can purchase Tokyo Highway here.

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Review: Fungi

Daren Hutton8 comments
Fungi is a 2 player card game revolving around mushroom foraging. In the game, you are searching through a forest for different mushrooms to cook the most delicious meal. 

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Review: Star Realms

Daren Hutton13 comments

Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 20mins
Age: 12+


Star Realms is the hugely popular, fast-paced deck-building game where players are building fleets of spaceships and doing battle in the deep space of the far future.

In Star Realms all players start with an identical deck of low-powered cards.  Some cards give the player Trade which works as currency in the game to buy better cards from the shared Trade Row in the centre of the table. Other cards give the player Combat which you use to attack the other players to reduce their Authority. The aim of the game is to reduce your opponents to zero Authority.  Each turn players draw and play 5 cards from their deck, resolving their abilities, buying new cards and attacking their enemies. 

The Trade Row is made up of random cards drawn from the 80 card Trade Deck.  These cards are from four the different factions in the game, Trade Federation (who’s cards are blue), The Blobs (green), Star Empire (yellow) and Machine Cult (red),  when cards of the same faction are played in the same turn there are certain benefits described on certain cards so it is rewarding for building your deck in certain ways.


Star Realms is one of the most addictive card games I have ever played. Games are quick and fast-paced and once a game has finished you will instantly want to go back for more. It recalls classic deck-building games like Dominion but also has elements of trading card games like Magic: The Gathering. There are several expansions available that add new rules and cards as well as a stand-alone fantasy version of the game called Hero Realms which is just as good! 

Deck-Building
Easy to Learn
Sci-Fi
Fast-Paced

You can buy star realms here

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Review: Alien: The Roleplaying Game

Daren Hutton7 comments

Players: 2+
Playing Time: 60mins+
Age: 15+


Alien: The Roleplaying Game is an immersive, story-telling game based on the classic sci-fi horror movie franchise.

If you have never played a role-playing game before, the idea can seem quite daunting but Alien has very simple rules and the rulebook is so well written and laid out that old hands and new roleplayers alike will be able to follow that game.  One player takes the role of Game-Mother (a good nod to the name of the computer in the original film) or GM while the others take on different roles and characters. You can use pre-made characters or there are rules for creating your own from scratch. During the game, the GM will describe the story and the other players describe what their characters do and how they act throughout. There will be certain situations when the players will need to roll dice to see if their actions fail or succeed.


The rules for Alien are extremely simple but very thematic. When you need to see if your actions succeed you roll a number of regular six-sided dice determined by your characters abilities, some characters may be better at fighting or shooting guns, while others may be more skilled at fixing spaceships or rigging traps for example.  If any of the dice roll a six then you have succeeded. As your characters face more and more threats (usually killer aliens as you can imagine) the more stressed they get, each character has a Stress level that means that they roll more dice but the more dice they roll the more likely they are to freak out and will have to roll on a table to determine how they act.

The combat in Alien is also very thematic, involving the GM secretly moving the aliens around a map while the characters use their in-game scanners to try and track them, leading to several moments that recall classic scenes from the movies.


Alien can also be played in two ways. A Cinematic mode where players usually use pre-made characters in one-off games and a more involved Campaign setting where games are played over several sessions.


If you love Dungeons & Dragons and want to try something similar in the world of the Alien movies then look no further. It’s a perfect game for people who are fans of the Alien films and also looking to get into Roleplaying Games.


Roleplaying Game
Sci-Fi/Horror
Immersive

You can buy Alien: The Roleplaying Game here

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Review: Flash Point: Fire Rescue

Daren Hutton1 comment
In Flash Point: Fire Rescue players take the roles of firefighters working together to save people from a burning building.

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Review: Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space

Daren Hutton
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is a card game of strategy and bluff set on a badly damaged deep space research ship. On-board systems have failed, plunging the ship into darkness. But even worse: A mysterious alien plague has crept aboard and is transforming the human crew into horrendous monsters!

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Review: Kingdomino - Easy & quick game for children & adults

Daren Hutton
Kingdomino is a brilliantly addictive tile-placement game where players try to create the highest-scoring kingdom by laying matching domino-like tiles. (Do you get the name Kingdomino yet?)

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Review: V-Commandos

Daren Hutton
V-Commandos is a cooperative WW2 stealth board game for 1-4 players.

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Review: Patchwork - Sweet, Simple & Strategic

Daren Hutton2 comments
In Patchwork, players compete to make the best patchwork quilt.  It doesn’t sound like the most exciting theme but it makes for a brilliant and surprisingly tactical game.

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Piepmatz Review

Daren Hutton5 comments

Welcome to our first review

We thought we would start with something simple to get ourselves going 

 

In Piepmatz, you skillfully play bird cards from your hand to collect seeds and birds at the bird feeder. Seeds and mated pairs of birds in your collection are worth points. Single birds score only if you have the most of their species. The course of play is the same for all numbers of players. On a turn, you go through these three phases in order:

  • Play a card — Select a bird card from your hand and place it face up at a perch of your choice.
  • Resolve effects — Compare the birds on the ground with the bird at the perch. Take a seed card or add a bird to your collection. Move a bird to the feeder.
  • Draw new cards — Replenish your hand.

Standard 2 Player Set up

A standard 2 Player set up

The game end is triggered when you are supposed to draw a card from an empty feeder deck. Play continues until all players have had an equal number of turns. Each player now chooses two bird cards from their hand and discards them face down. Once all players have done this, add your remaining two bird cards to your collection and commence the scoring. You score points for seeds, mated pairs of birds, and species majorities. Whoever has the most points wins.

 

 

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