Board Game Review: Near and Far (Part 1)

Oh my goodness, guys, I am so excited for this week's entry. I've been waiting for this entry for a long time! I tend to write my entries weeks in advance, mostly so that if I'm busy during a week, I don't miss posting. But that means if something really neat comes along, I have to wait a while until I have a week with no entry posted before I can say anything about it. So I've had to wait for this one.

One thing you may notice about this entry is that it's listed as 'Part 1.' That's because there is so much I want to say about this game, I've decided that I'm going to do it in two parts. Today's entry, part 1, will be an overview of the game itself. Next week, in part 2, I will discuss my thoughts on the game. And that's the part that's going to take some time to get through. Because there's a lot to be said about how I feel about this game.

All right, enough dilly-dallying. Let's get started!

This week, I am going to start reviewing the game Near and Far. As always, we're going to start by looking at some numbers. And as always, here's the chart that tells you what those numbers mean:

PinkFae Archive #12: Interview with Board Game Designer John Trobare

This week's entry is a very special PinkFae archive. It's my first game designer interview, and even better, it's an interview with my good friend John Trobare. This interview was first posted on 19 March 2016, not long after he had successfully published his game Asphodel through Kickstarter. So let's get right into it!

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My good friend John Trobare is an accomplished individual. He created the game Asphodel, which he self-published last year through Kickstarter. In addition, he opened his own pizza delivery business two years ago. All this in addition to being a devoted father and husband, and playing games several times a week, including annual trips to the Geekway to the West convention in St. Louis.

I decided to interview Mr Trobare for this week's entry. So one Sunday evening, we sat down with some family and friends to talk over dinner.

Legacy Games: A Double Edged Sword

I enjoy the video reviews at Shut Up & Sit Down. I often disagree with their assessment of a game, which merely shows that I look for different things from my games than they do, and that's fine. But I still enjoy watching the reviews. In part, this is because they're very informative, and in part because they're generally enjoyable to watch. This will be pertinent to the upcoming board game review, which I will post in two weeks' time: Near and Far.

You guys, I am so impatient to post the review for Near and Far.

But right now, I want to talk about one of SU&SD's favourite things: legacy games. The guys over at SU&SD tend to fall all over themselves when talking about legacy games. In their review of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, they refer to Risk Legacy and other legacy games using the following statement: 'So, in other words, Pandemic Legacy is just like Risk Legacy, but with one vitally important difference: Pandemic was a great game to begin with!' (This statement can be found at time stamp 2:32). This implies that simply making a game into a Legacy version makes it great.

Board Game Review: Terraforming Mars

A friend of mine recently acquired a copy of Terraforming Mars. She was very excited to try it out, so I played it with her and a couple of others. It wasn't the first time I'd played; I'd had a go at it some months prior when another friend got a copy. Having now played it twice, I think the time has come to do a review of it.

So here we go with another Game Dork review. As always, we start with the ratings:

Strategy: 4
Randomness: 2
Complexity: 3
Humour: None
Attractiveness: Nice
Average Length of Game Play: 2 hours
Gamer Profile Ratings:
  Strategy: Medium
  Conflict: Low
  Social Manipulation: Low
  Fantasy: High

PinkFae Archive #11: Roleplaying: An Adventure in Imagination

As I work on reposting the articles that I wrote for PinkFae, we come to entry number 11. This post was originally published on 13 March 2016. Enjoy!

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I have talked at some length about board games, and a little about one specific roleplaying game, but I haven't yet talked in general about my favourite kind of games: roleplaying games. It's not surprising that I enjoy RPGs; as I've mentioned here before, I am a storyteller player type, which means that I most enjoy games that follow Freytag's pyramid, especially if they involve character growth and the development of interpersonal relationships. Given the right gaming group, roleplaying games are the best vehicle for telling stories as a game that you can hope to find. So I'm going to talk today about this wonderful type of game.

GMing for New Players

A local medieval re-enactment group recently held a special event, and I chose to take part. Specifically, the group hosted an RPG night; several people volunteered to GM a one-shot introductory game, and the others chose one of those games to play. The idea was to give veteran gamers a chance to play, if only briefly, and to give players an opportunity to experience a new system, and to give newbies the prospect of getting a taste of tabletop roleplaying games for the first time.

In case you're curious, there were six total GMs, running the following games: Dungeons and Dragons (because of course), Pathfinder, Starfinder, a Star Wars game using a modified Warhammer 40K system, Changeling: The Dreaming, and Fate Core. Surprisingly enough, I was not the one running Changeling: someone else had already offered to run that one, so I ran Fate instead.

But here's what I thought was interesting: a good friend of mine was very nervous about playing. She ended up joining my Fate game, but in the weeks leading up to the event, she asked me several times if it would be a problem that she had never really gamed before (technically, she had, but only in a limited way... more on that in a moment). I reassured her that I was very familiar with GMing for newbies, and had introduced quite a lot of people to the hobby over the years.

PinkFae Archive #10: Board Game Review: Theseus: The Dark Orbit

We have come to another PinkFae Archive, and this one is another one of the board game reviews that I wrote for that site. I hope you enjoy it!

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Time has come for another board game review. This time around, I will discuss a really nifty game to which I was recently introduced: Theseus: The Dark Orbit. In Theseus, you control one of four factions (or more, if you have any of the expansions) trapped on a space station in deep space. These factions are fighting for control of the station; only one can be victorious! Let's look the ratings for this game: