EXIT: The Game Kids - Jungle of Riddles - Board Game Review

The EXIT: The Game series are board games centered around the currently very popular "Escape Room" genre. I haven't tried Escaping any rooms anywhere (unless The Room counts) so when my brother presented me with one of the EXIT games I was intrigued to see how they worked. As this is not a review of the adult version of the series I will just shortly say that the premise is that the players work together to try to solve the puzzles in the game. The design is often clever and some time even fiendish - I don't want to spoil anything by giving too many examples, so just suffice to say you will probably be surprised when you play your first EXIT game.

EXIT: The Game for Kids is just what the name implies, an attempt at translating the experience for the younger audience. 

Now it is worth mentioning that the adult game is playable with younger kids, I had my 6 yo and 10 yo taking part when I tried it and they absolutely loved it. And while most of the puzzles are too hard for them to solve (they're almost too hard for an adult of average intelligence to solve), the team effort and experience is not lost on them. The fact that my kids enjoyed the adult version so much was a big reason I wanted to check out the kids version. The adult version is an intense, one-time (per game) experience but the Kids version promises replayability.

EXIT Kids is similar to the adult version in that the players must co-operate in solving puzzles. The solutions are fed into a code wheel that will allow the players to move on to the next task or in this case, finish the game. In EXIT Kids the game isn't linear, as one solution isn't necessary to try to solve another puzzle. All puzzles are available to be solved from the get go.

The players get six different puzzle cards to try to solve, in the Jungle of Riddles the theme is animals. The replayability comes from the puzzles coming in six different variants, so each new game you shuffle the cards and get a new set of challenges. I found that the variety of puzzles was quite inventive and clever, and ranged from very easy to requiring some time to think for my kids (as mentioned, 6 and 10 yo). You can't play this game too many times in a row, as you will remember the solutions, but if you play it every now and then the replayability is definitely there. A big plus to the game is that once you've explained what the goal of each puzzle is, the game is simple enough to set up that kids can actually play it without an adult participating. 

Always bring HP Sauce to my board gaming.

The game is recommended from age 5+ and I find that appropriate. Both in the sense that the game components are somewhat thin and fragile and will easily break in a rough 3 yo hands. But also in the level of challenge. My 6 yo found some of the puzzles a bit tricky, but my 10 yo was probably right at the upper age that would still find this game fun to play, the puzzles were easy for him to solve. This means that EXIT Kids feels like it has an upper age limit, and as an adult you'd do best to just watch your kids have fun.

The game only takes about 15 minutes to complete and I guess it speak to the games strengths that my kids immediately wanted to play it another time. I agree with the game recommendation of 1-4 players. There are "only" six different puzzles to solve - it's hard to have 4 kids co-operating around the same material, and it is hard to have kids sit around and wait while other kids solve puzzles. You can have them solve different puzzles simultaneously but there is only one code-wheel to share.

Overall EXIT Kids has the benefit of being simple enough in execution that it is almost like a toy, and something my kids enjoyed bringing out and play around with even on their own (similar to the Mouse Trap game, if you remember that, or a book of Where's Waldo?) The drawback is that the design doesn't really allow for adult participation, besides cheering from the sidelines. This is truly a game made only for kids.

Sagrada - Board Game Review

I'll admit, I am a fool for a good looking board game. Whenever I need to scratch the itch and go hunting for a new board game, I definitely go firstly by aesthetics. I've never quite let it guide my actions as with Sagrada though - the second I saw it I knew I needed it, regardless of gameplay.

Just look at it. And it is about crafting beautiful stained glass windows with colorful dice, I mean it can not get prettier than this. It had me hooked from the go. Is it any fun to play though?

Sagrada brands itself as a game about dice drafting and window crafting, and it sums it up well. If you've played a draft game before - like AQUA, Ticket to Ride or Cascadia - you've got the general idea. Players need to draft resources from a common pool to combine them and whoever scores the most points in the end wins. I've mentioned before that I enjoy the non-antagonistic nature of draft and tile placing games. While you compete for the same resources, the game isn't so much about ruining other people's play, but to optimize your own with what there is. Or at least, that is how you can choose to play it, and probably will have to if you like me are stuck mostly playing board games with little children.

In Sagrada the resources are colourful dice and the craft is your church window. At the start each player chooses a window to craft, and they come in different difficulties. Other than dice, you'll also have extra point challenges and tools to look out for. The extra point challenges are additional ways to place your dice for optimal points, and the tools allow you to fix things you've messed up (or are trying to avoid to mess up). Each player takes turn rolling a certain amount of dice (depending on number of players), and then take turns drafting from that pool. The luck factor is the same as in any draft game, you always hope what you need will turn up and that no one else will grab if before you.

The placement of the die follows some stringent rules - some dice can only be placed according to their value and some according to their colour. Add to this that you can't place two dice of the same colour/value next to each other. 

There is a lot to keep track off in other words and it is so easy to miss a placement. It's a bummer if you do, because it is not easy to try to fix it when you discover it a bit down the road. Once you've started placing other dice around it, they all become wrong. Sudoku comes to mind here, if you've played that you know the feeling. All players should help each other out in making sure the dice placement is correct, to avoid this problem.

Another issue is that dice like to roll. Despite their edgy design, they are literally made to roll around and that becomes apparent as soon as you've started gathering a few pieces onto your window. When you need to squeeze in a die between a few other it is way too easy to accidentally push them aside, flipping their sides and messing up your beautiful order. Best case scenario you need to carefully reassemble and hope your co-players don't accuse you of cheating. Worst case scenario you don't remember exactly how they were placed and you're screwed. This happens easily and is something to really keep in mind when playing the game. A knock with your elbow on the table can actually ruin a run of game if you're unlucky enough. I have this issue more or less with any game that requires tiles to be placed on the board in fragile constellations (mostly because little children's arms yank around like a marionette doll's), but Sagrada is especially sensitive to this problem.

But enough about the nitpicky, Sagrada is fun. It is fun to look at and it is fun to play. As with many draft games similar to this you can adapt the difficulty simply by adding or removing goal components. When I play with my 6 yo the goal is simply to try to complete our windows, and she loves it (the 10 wasn't appealed by pretty colours and isn't a fan of the game).  If you're playing someone with higher ambitions there are several layers of point collecting to add, and if you're really trying to get to the higher echelons you've got a real brain twister in your hands.

Sagrada of course also has a solo mode, which plays similarly as the regular and can be a fun way to kill some time in the evening. I am going to make the comparison to a round of sudoku again, but just way prettier. By now Sagrada also has a few expansion packs, that add more of the fun I am assuming. I haven't had a chance to check them out and currently I am perfectly happy with the core game as it is anyway.

All in all Sagrada ticks a lot of boxes for me - easy to grasp and set up, easily customizable for different difficulties and amazing from a tactile and aesthetic point of view - and the only way I can see you not having fun with this is if you, like my 10 yo, think colourful dice are stupid.

Night in the Woods (PC, 2017)

 "You're Mae. Your grandpa is dead. You're all alone at a station, somewhere in Possum Springs. Someone is blocking the door to the only way out. You need to give him something so he will move away."

Can a game be about that time when you've just become an adult, life feels like it's yours for the taking but also like you have no idea how to do it? Night in the Woods seems to think so.

The introductory quote is from my 10 yo and describes the very beginning of the game. Night in the Woods was a game I hoped we could play together, having the idea that it would be a nice little mystery-solving puzzler. But it's not really that and it's clear that me and my 10 yo experienced the game quite differently. But we both enjoyed it.

We follow the cat Mae as she moves back home to her backwater hometown of Possum Springs, one of those places that barely remembers its glory days of when things actually happened around there. Some of Mae's best friends still live there, working jobs that they hate, trying to make the escape that Mae has already made and returned from. A lot of the game is about their dynamic as a group of friends, the feeling of not knowing where you belong and navigating what it means to be an adult.

While Mae walks and jumps around her hometown, we converse with her parents, her old neighbours, people who knew her when she was a child and before she moved. We also find there is a kid missing and Mae starts to think that there is something weird going on - will people believe her or will they think she is just trying to get attention? We help our friends with their every day problems and try to rekindle the spark of being a teenager without a care in the world.

The smooth, popping graphics is one of the things that drew me to the game in the first place. It's fun to see the characters wag as they talk and the eyes rolling around in their heads as they're looking around. The game controls definitely feel optimized for a gamepad, on PC with regular WASD and spacebar for movement and C for interacting. The game keeps it really simple though and you will never struggle to do the right thing.

Personally I found that Night in the Woods had a good balance between mini-games and story. Mini-games is all you could call it really, you will find yourself in situations where you get to try to press the right thing at the right time. Maybe you're helping your friend move a sofa, maybe you are trying to steal a battery out of a car, maybe you're trying to stab your best friend in a play-knife-fight. Each mini-game is fun and didn't outstay its welcome. They didn't feel like they were necessary for the game either, but they were a nice way to break up the pace and make it not all about talking. To my kid it was too much talking.

But I was actually quite shocked at how much this game hit home with me. I am sure not everyone will identify with Mae's short story in Possum Springs, but to me it was like looking in a mirror. I have been in pretty much that situation, albeit for other reasons. Moving in to a small, back-water town. Hanging out with people who have lived there their whole life, none of us kids anymore, none of us quite yet getting the idea behind being an adult. We had these conversations, we had these thoughts and feelings. That juxtaposed sensation of being on top of the world and completely lost at the same time. Feeling like you're in your own little corner of life and no one understands you. Now, 20 years on from that part of my life, hanging out with Mae and her friends turned out to be a nostalgia hit for me I had not anticipated.

The 10 yo had fun with the mini-games and the mystery (because there is one, but it's not the main focus of the game), to me Night in the Woods turned out to be a bit more than just a handful hours of fun. It's worth noting that I played the "Weird Autumn Edition" which seems to be the definitive edition, a sort of director's cut which includes content that was cut from a previous version. I am not sure any other version is available any longer.

Reading up on the game before I started writing this I found out that there is a whole nother side to it that I won't be commenting on in this review, as it is completely unrelated to the game itself. 

I really enjoyed my stay in Possum Springs. We finished it at around 8,5 hours, and some of that was spent by my 10 yo not wanting to continue the story and just explore the tiny town. Your mileage might vary, depending on how your journey to adulthood turned out, but only requiring a few hours of your life I think you wouldn't regret checking this game out.

Here is a nice little short animation Youtuber Worldwidewebuser has up on Youtube.

GoldenEye N64 - A Retrospective

I love going to boot sales and flea markets, you never know what you are going to find. My hopes are always on video games (other than sports and The Sims games, they seems to be the only thing I find) and nostalgic stuff from the 90's. I was over the moon when I found a handful of Mighty Max stuff once. Or the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Board Game.

A while back I went to a boot sale and actually found some interesting video games. Wetrix and GoldenEye for the N64. Wetrix I had only heard of (and trying it out it didn't seem particularly interesting) but GoldenEye... we go way back. I already own a copy, that I got as a kid and played to bits with my friends. I only own the cartridge though, and this copy was complete with box, manual, inlays and all. Of course I had to have it. As I was deciding to buy it, the seller - a man about my own age - came up to me and started chatting. It was obvious he was very reluctant to let go of the games, but I tried to ensure him they were going to a loving home.

As I came home I wanted to see if they worked. I have often thought back on all the fun I used to have with this game back in the day. We had all kinds of unofficial playing modes, like "Terminator" where one of us played with +10 health and everyone else was -10. With proximity mines or grenades there could be so much clutter effects you'd get serious slow downs. But thinking back I was still unsure how much it would hold up today. I had actually avoided revisiting it so that my memories of the game wouldn't be spoiled by the reality that it just wasn't very good anymore.

I thought maybe the graphics, the controls, the gameplay overall just weren't up to what I'd enjoy now, or maybe especially what my kids would enjoy coming to it without the rose-tinted goggles. I've revisited other loves of my youth and come out disappointed (the Narnia-series is an example).

But now I had to test my new copy, there was no reason to avoid it any longer. I sat down with my 10 yo and gave it a go. And we had so much fun.

Everything was just like I remembered it. If I had thought my modern self would have trouble with playing a shooter on the console I was dead wrong. The controls are just great. Sure aiming isn't perfect, but in multiplayer that just adds to the fun. The levels are well designed, the music is awesome. The weapons are fun and allow for fights that are more on the serious side or completely bonkers "let's blow ourselves and everything else up too"-type. My kid absolutely loved it. He never wanted to stop playing it. He hasn't wanted to play anything else with me since we tried it - this game has trumped Minecraft, Lego Jurassic World, Mario Kart 8, you name it.

My first console, but not my last.

This game hasn't even aged, it is just as good as it was when it was released and if you're sitting on a copy I really recommend you break it out with some friends. I still consider this one of the very best multiplayer experiences out there.

But I have a confession to make - I have never once played the single player mode of GoldenEye. I vaguely recall trying the first stage, but never even made it through that. With the multiplayer being as fun as it is, and considering how many hours I put into that part of the game I was a bit confused as to why I never got further into the main campaign. It's James Bond after all, one of my favorite franchises.

Revisiting the game made me want to give it another, or more honestly a first, real go. So I started up the first stage, The Dam, put it on easy and ran out to do some spying. Or so I thought. The controls are completely different from multiplayer and I struggled to move anywhere. Whereas you use the joystick to move and the L/R-button to target in multiplayer, in single player you use the joystick to target and the yellow buttons/D-pad to move. My brain could not wrap itself around this control scheme and I constantly aimed into the sky while I got shot in the face. 

No wonder I gave up so early. The control scheme is so bad I had completely scrubbed the experience from my brain. I just can't understand why they would go with two completely different ways of controlling you character, and then use the weird one for the main campaign. In a way I am glad they did though because I am sure we would've never spent all those hours playing multiplayer if it had used that way of controlling the characters. Playing old games, or PC ports of console games, I have had to get used to a lot of odd control schemes and I usually don't mind (having to use IJKL on Moonlighter recently was a new experience).

But this one wasn't just odd, it went contrary to endless hours of hardwiring in my brain and I realized I wouldn't be able to break through that muscle memory any time soon. I guess I am going to have to watch a Let's Play of the campaign instead.

AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans - Board Game Review

What if you play Cascadia, but under water? Well, let me introduce you to AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans. Any draft game will feel similar to other draft games to a certain extent, but AQUA borrows a lot of its identity from Cascadia - which is understandable since Cascadia has some great core ideas. It does mean however that unless you really love this game style specifically, you might not need AQUA if you already own Cascadia. But let's dig down a bit deeper, does AQUA have any original ideas as well?

The game in AQUA is to create underwater habitats/coral reefs to attract certain animals. To do this you draft hexagonal pieces of reef that need to be fitted with other pieces in certain ways to allow for you to place animal tokens. These habitat tokens look just like in Cascadia, even down to your starting zone, except one is on land and the other under water. One major difference here between AQUA and Cascadia is that where Cascadia allows you to put your habitat tokens wherever (you score more points for fitting them certain ways though), you must fit them following certain rules in AQUA. Also unlike Cascadia where you place animal tokens every turn, in AQUA you can only place an animal token once your habitat tokens line up to fill certain requirements.

At first you can attract smaller animals, and once they are placed in certain patterns you can attract larger animals for bigger points. There is a lot of strategizing when you choose between fast, small points or try to build for larger, harder to reach points - just like any good draft game should be. There are also a lot of optional requirements to meet for extra points. Trying to keep the end game in sight while making good choices here and now works well in AQUA. There isn't much antagonizing between players, while you can pick a habitat token you don't really need simply to mess with someone else's well laid plans, it's difficult to completely ruin someone's day like in LUDO. This is a big plus point for me as it's easier to convince my kids to play something where they'll always feel like they have a chance.

The game itself is heavy, literally - all the habitat and animal tokens are in gorgeous, chunky card board that are easy to handle and fun to look at, there is some great value for money here. When I first opened the box I was worried that all the tokens would be thrown around, since the game comes with no bags to hold them. Turns out the game itself provides you with a setup that you build inside the box that allows you to store your tokens just perfectly when you want to put your game away.

I mentioned in my review of Cascadia that even my 5 yo can play it with some minor help, this is even more true for AQUA where the playstyle is very adaptable depending on who you are playing with. In essence the game is just about matching colors and trying to build shapes. Me and my kids usually just play with the face value points, whereas more seasoned players can opt in for all the extra requirements to try to gather more points. Or not - the simplest form of AQUA is a nice, quick little fix of board gaming that works well, and is easy to set up, understand and play.

It seems to be standard nowadays that draft board games come with some sort of solo mode - a fascinating trend in board games, that I hope never goes away - and AQUA has one too of course. It doesn't change much of the setup, you simply play the game as usual but try to beat certain challenges. The rule book (which has a nice, luxurious feel to it) comes with an extensive highscore board to compete against other players, or just yourself like a chaser of points in a Tetris game.

AQUA borrows a lot from Cascadia but has its own identity, though maybe not enough unless you're really into this kind of gameplay. AQUA might even be even more adaptable to different skill levels but in the end the choice probably simply comes down to what you prefer - to play with bears or whale sharks?