BEANO the Board Game - Board Game Review

Have you heard of Dennis the Menace? No, not that Dennis. The other Dennis. Yeah, they're two, and if you're from the UK you most likely know what I am talking about. Through some freak coincidence, two Dennis the Menace were created and debuted on the same day back in 1951. You can't make that stuff up. They're also still both ongoing.

What else do they have in common you ask? Well, they're both about mischievous little boys (hence the name one would guess) with a pet dog. While US Dennis is well meaning but gets into trouble, the UK Dennis is definitely more of a cunning prankster. In fact, the UK Dennis has had to have a bit of a clean-up recently as he could have been considered something of a bully for most of his existence.

I had never heard of the UK Dennis before I met my SO from England, who introduced me to Dennis' magazine The Beano. The Beano sports a plethora of characters with similarly witty names and dubious personalities, like Minnie the Minx, Roger the Dodger, Bash Street Kids, Les Pretend and Ivy the Terrible. Some of the more cheeky characters have had to move over for kids with other skills, like Dangerous Dan, Ruby and Betty (with her Yeti), presumably because a magazine focused entirely on being naughty doesn't fly so well anymore.

As you can imagine The Beano characters are also available in various kinds of merchandise, of which my children already own most - thanks to an enthusiastic Beano-fan, their father. They have mugs, t-shirts, jumpers, bed sheets, back packs, lunch boxes and hats, to mention a few. Then we also have Beano themed "Who's There?", "Top Trumps" and "Clue" board games.

And we also own the board game I intend to talk a little about here, the BEANO Board Game, which is its own original idea giving the players the opportunity to try to be the one who does more pranks than the other players.

To do this the player needs to collect sets of two cards. One card represents the prank object, like a wiggly worm, a whoopee cushion or a stink bomb. The other card represents the idea of what kind of prank to do with the item, like throwing a water balloon at the Cinema or throwing a stink bomb at the Lighthouse. Once you have a set of cards (water balloon and Cinema) you need to get to the Cinema on the board to collect your point.

Sounds easy enough. Of course there are plenty of things that can go wrong along the way. Other players can "nab" your idea and certain areas on the board forces you to trade your prank items with each other. There is a lot of opportunity to ruin your co-players plans and you often have to act as quickly and as secretly as possible. Your ideas are open for anyone to see, but your prank items are hidden. Until you have to trade them off that is...

For better or worse, there is a good amount of luck required to be the winner in this game, since you both need to collect "the right" pranks and ideas, but also land on squares on the board that are beneficial to you. The tactical element lies in which path to take and which prank to try to achieve, since each roll with the die often gives you several different options. I think the board makes a decent job at trying to level out some of the luck - if you don't get the right cards, you might be able to steal them from other players instead. Rolling the die and ending up on a white square is probably the worst that can happen in this game, an entire round of not really achieving anything.

You can play the game two players, but I'd recommend being at least three. The more you are, the more happens each round, the less safe you feel and the more chaos will ensue. That is when this game is at its best. Be prepared to make some enemies because this game allows you to be very cruel. 

Overall  I think the game does a good job at being fun while also staying true to the BEANO soul - running around trying to do as many pranks as possible is entirely in the right vein of the BEANO comic. If you want something cerebral and deep, this is definitely not the game for you. But if you're a fan of the BEANO comic and want an evening of aggravating your co-players, you could definitely do worse.

Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) - Review

 Remember gaming magazines? Remember when gaming magazines came with floppies with game demo's? Even though I received countless over the years I only remember one - the demo for Wolfenstein 3D. Though it was a bit too stressful for my young self, my brother loved it. It only contained the first three levels, but I remember him playing them over and over and over, poring over each stage trying to find secrets, while I watched.

Then it was quiet on the Wolfenstein front for a while and I largely missed the games released before 2010. But then in 2014 Wolfenstein was suddenly back into my conscious with a bang - with the release of Wolfenstein: New Order, developed by Swedish company MachineGames and published by none other than Bethesda. This looked like a fresh and fun take of the by then long running game franchise, that also fit my matured taste, and I was very curious to try it. But back-logs being what they are, I didn't actually get around to it until ten years later (!), when I finally booted it up this year. Fortunately, the game turned out to be well worth keeping around...

You play as William "BJ" Blazkowicz who was first introduced in the series in Wolfenstein 3D - coincidentally, I had no idea what the main character was called all those years ago watching my brother play, but it was very fun to see that it was lore wise supposed to be the same. BJ hasn't changed much from Wolfenstein 3D and presents such a chiseled look as to almost look parodically non-human. 

In the New Order the Nazis win the war. Consequently the Nazis, always being the most grateful villain since they have zero redeeming qualities, take over the world and BJ needs to fix it by killing the new leader Wilhelm Strasse also known as Deathshead. Apparently there are some characters and story elements that carry over from the games that I missed, like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Deathshead being one of them. 

To do this you get equipped with a ton of weapons and kill a ton of nazis. The game straddles a very well balanced point between a "spray and pray"-game like Serious Sam and "Only kill what you must"-game like Dishonored. There are elements of trying to stay out of sight and getting the surprise attack, but never to the point where you actually ever feel sneaky. The game knows this and isn't designed with any HUD that shows you whether you are visible to enemies or not. You find out because you suddenly hear screaming and get shot at. This never becomes a problem, instead you lean in to it. Even though I might start out trying to stab people one by one in silence, it almost always ends up with me running like a crazy session of paintball and shooting anything that moves. No enemy feels like an ungrateful bullet sponge and all combat feels satisfying.

I played the game on normal difficulty and most of it was fairly easy. The game is very generous with health and ammo at almost all points. It's still not advisable to run into the center of the room and shoot wildly at whatever you see, that will get you killed, and especially if you haven't taken care of sentries first. Most stages take at least some planning and tactics, and utilizing a variety of your arsenal. I had to replay certain segments a few times because I got stuck in the open and was quickly gunned down.

You might see where I am going with this, so let's just say it - the game does pretty much everything right. 

All the weapons are fun and they all pack the right punch. Using different weapons in different ways allows you to unlock perks that improves BJ in different ways, like allowing him to reload faster or carry more ammo. This encourages you to play a bit outside your comfort zone and try all the different weapons in different ways.

The atmosphere is great, they even made re-recordings of famous songs as Nazi-versions, this is something you have to go check out on Youtube. The music playing in the background will get you pumped at the right times. There is definitely an extra level of atmosphere if you can read German like me, the game is littered with world building tidbits - a lot of them are translated into English but not all. The attention to detail is astonishing, there is even a playable remake of Wolfenstein 3D in a corner of the game!

But the most important thing that New Order gets right is how it constantly manages to keep things fresh. BJ will travel all over, with varied stages and challenges - you even go to the moon for part of the game (!). New weapons and upgrades get introduced at a perfect speed. There is never a moment to get bored, you'll always want to check what there is around the corner and how you can take on the next stage.

You'll meet a well written set of characters that help you forward. The jargon is rough and tough, just like everything else in this game. BJ gets to do an absurdly heavy load of work for the resistance, but then he seems to be basically immortal. The stages let you sneak one moment to get some head shots in, to swiftly let you don double shotguns to run around the corner and fill some dudes face with bouncy bullets. You'll drive a mini-sub and like mentioned jump around on the surface of the moon. I don't want to spoil too much in case you like me have saved this game in your catalogue for a rainy day, let me just say that the 13-14 hours the game will take you will not be wasted.

Rarely do I play a game and constantly smile over all the great gameplay and design choices that the developers have made. I can barely even nitpick but I am going to do my best. At one point in the game you discover some sort of super armor, it looks rad as all hell. Two of the NPCs get to use it, but BJ never does and I was a bit disappointed at that missed opportunity. Also I had trouble swapping to the right weapon in the heat of battle some times, and that got me killed more than once. I can't really complain at the controls though, on PC there is both the option to use mapped keys and scroll to swap weapons so the problem was most definitely on me.

The game got two prequels, Old Blood and New Colossus, that I am definitely looking forward to playing as well. If they're half as well made as this game I know I am in for a good time.

Weeeooo Weeeooo - Board Game Review

 Let's face it, a lot of board games for young children are quite boring. I think this is because some game creators think "simple" means "purely based on luck". But a good board game for young children, at least if you ask me, should still require some level of skill or tactical thinking, designed in a way that it fits the age group. Even better if the design is such that it fun for any age group. Is this even possible?

Let's take a closer look at the lovely and aptly named board game Weeeooo Weeeooo - they could've just gone with something boring like "Here comes the Fire Engine", but this shows the level of dedication - and see how it holds up to my adult eye.

Weeeooo Weeeooo is a board game in which you play as a fire fighter who gets called on missions. The goal is to complete as many missions as possible, but if you're not careful you get called to lunch and lose your points. Each round the player flips cards to see whether they are a point (mission) or a point reset (lunch break). To get the point the player also need to have brought the right tools - two out of three possible, since every mission requires a certain tool to be completed. If someone fails to complete mission/s, the point goes over to the next player in turn. So the game is essentially a risk vs reward assessment game and its great fun to see how differently young players can approach the game mechanics. Some go the safe route and only take a few points per turn, some (most) go all in and just hope for the best.

I find this fairly simple premise easy to grasp for any age group above the "put everything in your mouth"-age and this means that as an adult you don't have to go out your way to avoid being the supreme winner nor smiling through boredom. While the tools add another layer of activity to the game, they're basically just luck based. To pick a card or not pick a card, that is the only question and it's a pretty fun and interesting one, at least for the 10-15 minutes that the game lasts. I played this with my kids from the age of 2 with no problem, though at that age the components are still more fun to play with than to win with.

I forgot to tell you about the best part - the game includes a little fire fighter figure and best of all the game box itself turns into an actual fire engine with which you can drive around and complete/pick up missions.

This is probably difficult to get hold of now, so I'll make a general recommendation. Risk assessment gameplay is usually fun for most ages and something that can be designed to level out some of the differences in skill. It's a good style of game to bet on when trying out games for the youngest kids that actually require some thinking, maybe something to kindle an interest into heavier things to come.

Weeeooo Weeeooo is a fun and well designed game in this category, one that I feel goes that little extra distance and I whole heartedly recommend it.

Diablo (1997)

 I don't want to call this a failure, but... there is just no other way to explain my experience with Diablo.

But let's back up a bit. Diablo is one of my earliest and fondest memories of computer gaming, sitting behind my mom as she was playing it on our old Mac. So much so I even have a quote from the game as the tagline of my blog! I never really tried it myself but had a lot of fun with Diablo 2 and 3. 

I recall my mom struggling with Diablo, she had to cheese Butcher by shooting him through a grate and eventually managed to save-kill herself my accidentally saving a second before she got swarmed by mobs. Then she moved on to calmer things like The Dig and Myst.

But in the back of my head lingered the feeling of a special relationship with Diablo, one that I would one day go full circle and play it like my mom did back in the day. I soon realized that would only come too true.

So I start it up and roll a warrior. The choices in Diablo are few and simple. That is a welcome sight for an amateur like me that I don't have to know whether I need a half-orc mage-paladin and what stats are best for those, but everything is pretty much ready and set for me. And maybe a bold move for Blizzard at the time when so many were still leaning heavy into the D&D rules. Here all you've got is someone who hits hard, someone who shoots a bow and someone who casts spells. Not much else to think about when getting started. With old games like this I always go for the melee, figuring they are somehow the easy mode with less to keep track off.

The music in Diablo is the kind of music I think could even give people fake nostalgia at this point, but for someone who like me was there for real, with all the extra hipster points, it gives off goosebumps. I think there are few tunes as perfect at conveying the right message and atmosphere from the get-go as the Tristram theme, and it's fortunate it's such an epic tune because you will be hearing it a lot. Definitely up on my top 10 Tunes That Gives Me The Feels-list. Eerie and calm at the same time, few tunes can pull this off. The Save Room Theme from Resident Evil is another one.

The game presents you as a returning citizen of Tristram. The local populace tell you that much evil has happened since you left. The local church has been desecrated and is being used for devilish purposes. They ask you to check it out and maybe also get rid of the local bad boy, The Butcher. You quickly notice that the church is just the very tiny top of a very huge hell-hole iceberg. 

I felt pretty gung-ho about myself as I went down the first set of stairs and came out into a massive crypt. I immediately set out to bash and smash some skeletons and imps jumping around. The permeating soundscape made sure any visitors would know there was nothing good coming from strolling down here, but I was doing quite well. Eventually I leveled up and encountered my first surprise. 

As you level up you get a certain amount of points to set into your stats. Your stats will affect everything from health, mana and what kind of gear you can use. But what I didn't find anywhere was a skill tree. Did the game mean for me to have this one click slash attack for the entirety of the game? Surely not? Reading up on it I find that to learn new skills you have to find book drops throughout the game. So they aren't inherit to the class, but random drops from mobs in the game. I guess it technically means any class can eventually learn any skill, though they will use them with different proficiency, but it does mean that until you find the drops you want and need, you're stuck with what ends up being a pretty repetitive skill set. People might've had the time and patience for this back in the day, but I definitely didn't find it amusing.

The game is a dungeon crawler in every sense. You go further and further down, killing everything you see and hope you get the right drops. In this game I find it to be a huge drawback that the mobs don't respawn, meaning that there is a set amount of experience (and loot) to gain from each level. There is no saving yourself by grinding some extra levels here, and that is usually my go to.

As I ventured further down it didn't take me long to encounter The Butcher's lair. I remembered what it looked like from back in the day, so I didn't get shocked when "FRESH MEAT!" was screamed into my face. I remembered The Butcher being hard, but he absolutely smashed me. I realized I wouldn't stand a chance unless I leveled up quite a bit. In fact, I struggled a lot against some rare mob on the same level and had to kite it several laps before it succumbed. Only for me to receive some half-decent helmet.

See here is the issue I have with Diablo; You always feel like you are one step behind. I am constantly short on money, which means I am short on healing/mana potions and short on gear. Which means I struggle against enemies even in the early game and I never feel like I catch a break.

After hitting my head against skeletons and imps for a while (maybe that's not the way to do it?) I decide to see if I am playing the wrong class. After failing equally hard on the ranger and mage I decide to see if the Hellfire expansion changed some of the things I had trouble with. And it did, it made leveling a little bit easier. The levels seem to be larger, or maybe the enemies give more experience. Either way I was several levels higher than I had been on my "classic" run once I got to Butcher again. Didn't matter much though, I still didn't stand much chance against him.

And that's fine, The Butcher is supposed to be the first boss of the game and it makes sense you need to gear up and level up to beat him. But everything just takes a bit too long. Getting levels, getting skills, getting decent gear. It's too repetitive and not enough... fun.

I had to conclude that my try with Diablo was a bit of a fiasco.

I feel like they fixed a lot of these gripes I have with Diablo in Diablo 2, but maybe I am misremembering that one too? I haven't played it in ~15 years, so maybe it is time to try that one again, and hopefully have a better time.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (PC, 2014)

There can be defining moments of your teenage years, and the movie The Mummy was definitely one of those for me. It hit me like a slap across the face and I woke up to the glorious mystery that was Ancient Egypt. I became a little bit obsessed, when other teenagers had posters of Legolas and Anakin on their walls (that's what people had in the early 2000's right?) I begged my mom to take me to Egypt to visit the pyramids. I decided to learn how to read hieroglyphs and... well long story short, a game themed around ancient Egypt sounded like it would be right up my alley, because even though the obsession has mostly died down by now, I still think ancient Egypt is rad has hell.

I have also always had the intention to play some sort of Lara Croft game, and by now there are many to choose from. Well, there you have it - two good reasons for me to check this game out.

I liked the isometric design of it, being a big fan of games like Fallout 1 & 2. Somewhere I also thought that the rest of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (LCTO) would be in that vein, but I was very wrong. Turns out LCTO is a multiplayer action-puzzler and I was immediately struck by two problems: 1. A game designed around multiplayer but no one to play it with and 2. An isometric game but only WASD to control it with.

Let's just establish that WASD is not the best way to control any game that is viewed at an angle (hilariously the control scheme is compared to a SpongeBob Squarepants game on Wikipedia). I couldn't get my usual trusty setup of PS2 controllers to work with this game though, so keyboard is what I've got. Just think about it, to move the direction the game considers straight, I have to press two buttons. During the platforming elements and heated moments of battle it was easy to get confused and this definitely got me killed more often than I liked.  On the flipside, I think aiming is probably a whole lot easier done with the mouse than a controller, though weirdly Lara can't shoot urns that are right next to her. It does mean however that I can't make any comment as to the qualities of the game as a multiplayer experience, I am sadly without friends... who play video games.

It is weird to play this game on your own though. The other people on your team - Horus, Isis and some schmoe named Carter Bell - constantly talk to you, yet are nowhere to be seen within the dungeons. It just emphasized that I was playing it alone, and even the game was confused about it like it was saying "wait, you really don't have friends?".

It's usually clear where you need to go and what you need to do, the game gives you plenty of hints. Enemies are thematically obvious being mostly mummies and scarabs of varying kinds but this is what I expect and want going into a game taking place in ruins from ancient Egypt. It is clear they've borrowed more than a few things from the aforementioned 1999 Mummy movie, I swear the music that plays occasionally is almost exactly the theme tune to the movie. The atmosphere is definitely ancient Egypt, albeit with cool and magical machinery around every corner.

The story is... well, barely worth mentioning. Osiris and Isis were tricked by their brother Set who kills Osiris (the game mentions that Osiris and Isis are married, but not that they're siblings) and now Set has machinations on the human world. To prevent this from happening you need to re-awaken Osiris by reassembling his body parts. Setting out from a hub world, you enter different crypts/dungeons and make your way through, solving puzzles and shooting up the place like any good grave robber would do.  Lara still does what she does best and I never got bored of hearing the noise of an urn breaking or bombing pillars. The reward at the end of each dungeon is a another part of Osiris. Just be careful how you decide to google that, "How to find body parts in the crypt" might put you on some register somewhere.

All over the dungeon you can pick up gems that allow you to open chests in the hub world. The chests contain gear of varying and random quality, the more gems you pay the better the gear piece. The balance between puzzling and shooting is overall good, but actually leans a lot heavier on the puzzling than I was expecting. There are collectables and upgrades to find on each stage and the puzzles are not difficult to figure out, even for me - a notoriously bad puzzler.

To execute them is a different matter though. If combat gets tricky with the WASD control system (though never hard), puzzling can get downright irritating. Especially when there are timed puzzles where you need to really get your button presses correctly and Lara. just. won't. do. what. I. tell. her. to. Of course she does exactly what I tell her to, there is nothing wrong with the controlling - just the counter intuitive nature of it. After a particularly frustrating puzzle segment about 3,5 hours into the game I decided it was time to quit. I really wonder how the games are designed to be solved in multi-player, if they're the same then they're just way easier to do with more people.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is ok. If you love action-puzzlers or you're looking for a game to play with some friends then this has potential. Just make sure you play it with controllers.

Crying Suns (PC, 2019)

Some times I like to theorize a bit around the development process of a game I am playing. Did they have a good story and borrowed some good gameplay? Or did they enjoy the gameplay so much from another game they wanted to create a story for it?

It doesn't matter when the end result is as entertaining as Crying Suns, but it is clear that they were heavily inspired by another great game - Faster Than Light (FTL) - when creating this one.

I spent around 50+ hours dying in Faster Than Light back when it came out, probably the most fun I've had failing in any game in a long time. FTL is notorious for its difficulty, and even though it could be downright mean, the gameplay was so well designed the thought of "just another try" was never far away in your mind.

While this isn't a review on FTL, it's worth mentioning this since Crying Suns takes a lot of what makes it fun from that game. What it adds that gives it its own identity is a different kind of combat system and a story (the story in FTL was a bare bone reason to move your ship ahead). 

The story in Crying Suns has other good inspirations, the first that came to mind when playing it was the Empire- and Foundation-series by Isaac Asimov. The game starts out with you being reincarnated as Ellys Idaho, space admiral in the Imperial Fleet. Apparently the original Ellys Idaho died somewhere, and you are woken up as the spare (if you've followed the AppleTV+ series Foundation you get the idea). You meet your new BFF Kaliban who is an OMNI, a certain type of robot that you will soon learn helps humans around the galaxy with absolutely everything. It also seems Kaliban is the only working OMNI left in the galaxy, leaving the humans completely helpless and dying.

You set off together with a crew of characters that you will quite come to like through your run. Your task is to find out what has gone wrong and, if possible, fix it. You do this by traversing space in a huge battle ship and directing your armada in combat with a lot of different enemies. Everywhere you go you have a chance of encountering something; most often something that wants to kill you, but also people in need of help and objects to explore. Just like in FTL I find that the Universe is a harsh place, you're often tricked and trapped by people who pretend to be nice, and you're almost better off becoming the same asshat everyone else seems to be.

You will find yourself really struggling for resources quickly, especially the fuel that allows you to travel around, and turn every dime (or scrap as its called in this game) to make it just another jump, to hopefully better pastures. But the better pastures never come. Around every corner lurks evil and danger. 

It's a good thing evil and danger is so much fun to fight then. As mentioned Crying Suns employs a completely different battle style from FTL, in which you control space ships in real-time on a grid. The combat area can be affected by all sorts of additional hazards like turrets or meteor strikes, and the enemy ship of course has battle ships and weapons of its own.

There is a lot to tinker with and keep track off here, there are many different ship types, skills and weapons to keep you alive and the enemy dead. Fortunately you can always choose to pause combat to issue commands and overall the combat is well designed and very fun - I never grew tired of it. 

I did find that on normal mode I had to scrounge a bit too much for resources, which took away from the fun of exploring the story. In FTL this wasn't an issue since there wasn't any story worth exploring, just the challenge of getting to the end. But the story in Crying Suns is genuinely engaging. While there are encounters that are clearly randomly generated, I only came across duplicates two or three times on a full run, which is impressive. At the end of each zone you continue the story, and you also have a chance of encountering story parts within the zones.

Crying Suns succeeds with a lot of things; it has a story worthy of its own sci-fi series (if this gets printed I am interested!), while nothing spectacular and in certain areas cliché and predictable, it still explores a lot of themes that I personally find fun and interesting. It has a well designed and thought through gameplay, both when travelling through the zones and when battling through any of the very many battles you will encounter.

Visually every character is represented by a fairly rudimentary pixel creation, and space is littered with planets, space stations and battle ships that you visit in a framed style. It suits the game and works well for the gameplay and almost gives the game the feeling of a visual novel.

The world building and character exploration is just deep enough to fit the story and I would've loved to know more or be able to dig deeper. But that would've been another game. It's always a balance between game and story and overall I find Crying Suns has made smart choices. As mentioned however I could see this being further explored in a series of books that I wouldn't mind reading.

If I had to nitpick over anything its that you can't choose to engage in combat yourself, which left me  frustrated a handful of times. When I was tricked out of scrap by a space station I was flying past, I wanted to destroy it. But I just had to accept it and move on. Maybe Ellys Idaho has a stronger moral code than I do, luckily for the people on that space station. When I came across some pirates that chose to bribe me to let them be, I had to accept it (some times you can take the bribe and attack, but I came across an option where I couldn't). This is barely even an issue however.

I played about a third of the game on normal before I decided to enjoy it on easy. Easy is almost too easy, but at least it allowed me to not stress and to have the resources to go out on a limb here and there which in the end I think was a more enjoyable experience. It took me just over 14 hours to complete my first run, and after that you have replay value in trying to beat the game with different battle ships and trying to find out more parts of the main story (or get a different ending, there seemed to be three).

If you enjoy rogue-likes, space battles, sci-fi or just loved FTL I can really recommend checking this game out.

Eye of the Beholder (PC, 1991)

 As gamers we're constantly crushed between the onslaught of new games being released, but also all the games that came before we were old enough to play them or at least enjoy them. I am always trying to balance my gaming of new and old games, to make sure I don't miss out on old classic like Thief, Deus Ex and Heroes of Might and Magic 3. But my quest to sift through the Good Old Games I often come across the ones that didn't age so well. And also the ones that try the old formula but don't quite hit the mark. 

Eye of the Beholder, a game that came out on MS-DOS (remember that thing?) back in 1991 falls somewhere in between. For a dungeon crawler it actually holds up really well and improves on a lot of features and gameplay to similar games like Might & Magic that came out in the mid 80's. But dungeon crawlers of this era still rely on the players immense patience and fortitude to get through, having some cruel design choices. Let's go explore.

You control a group of adventurers, based on basic D&D rules (with all the problems that entails, I'll get back to that). You've been tasked to investigate the sewers beneath a city to find out what is going on down there. As soon as you enter your only way out is blocked and your only option is to work your way further in and further down.

The controls, at least on my version, were with the number pad. This actually worked well since it allowed me to choose between turning and strafing, which would really come in handy when fighting certain enemies. It was also something that on occasion would get me lost, when I accidentally hit turn instead of strafe and suddenly found myself facing the wrong direction. Fortunately the game provides you with a compass, which is quite crucial to keep track off. Some parts of the dungeon will deliberately try to throw you off by turning you around, and some times the only way to spot it before you get lost if by keeping an eye on the compass.

You fight by clicking your weapons/spells. Your front characters can hit (and be hit) in melee range, so it is wise to put your ranged characters in the back row. You only have two spots in the front row however, and this is the first occasion you can smeg yourself over during the character creation screen.

Oh D&D rules. I have complained about them before. And I will probably complain about them many times more. Maybe I should just learn to steer clear of games who implement this system too rigidly? Then again, Eye of the Beholder is actually an example of a game where this system doesn't work too badly. You really have to know which classes are worth rolling in the beginning however, I implore you to throw your pride out the window and look up a walkthrough for at least a bit of guidance on this. If you, for instance, think you want a group of only mages, you are in for a hell ride from the beginning.

Some group compilations are simply the way to go, and when you roll your character stats it's also important to remember that you can't just wing it. Old-school D&D is very harsh and doesn't play kindly to experimenting or deviating. 

Once you've made your best group however, I found Eye of the Beholder didn't suffer so much from one of the worst D&D curses, the combat targeting. Anyone who has played old D&D knows that combat is mostly spent missing whatever you're trying to hit. I don't understand why anyone thought this would be any fun, because it really isn't. In Eye of the Beholder there will still be a lot of missing, but not to the point where it gets frustrating.

Monsters are fortunately not infinite nor random, a certain amount spawn on each level and once you've worked your way through them you are free to explore. Overall I found the difficulty well balanced, and as long as you have a cleric in your group you can heal up between fights. Some enemies have cruel features however which make them a pain to deal with. Spiders have a high chance of poisoning you (unless you were smart enough to roll a dwarf with high constitution!) and I had no way to remove it. You can just watch your characters slowly die when this happens (there is also no way to resurrect characters to my knowledge). If you're lucky you've found some Cure Poison potions at this point. You only other option is to reload the game. You can save whenever so I just made it a habit to save after every combat or every 15 minutes or so.

I called EotB a dungeon crawler, but it really is more of a maze crawler. The game doesn't provide you with any map or mapping system, instead you need to rely on good old pen and paper, or if you're lucky you've got the Clue Book. It is provided with the GoG version of the game. I love the Clue Book, it is absolutely amazing. And absolutely necessary if you don't want to go insane down in those sewers. They twist and turn and like I mentioned even actively try to confuse you. The Clue Book provides maps, with detailed information on the whereabout of enemies and items and I don't care if it's considered cheating - as a working mom I simply don't have the time nor the mind power to work these things out on my own.

I can see the fun in trying to do it the old pen and paper way, it plays a bit like an escape room with added monsters. The dungeon is full of buttons to press, levers to pull, messages on walls and secret walls to walk through. Everything just takes so much time. I wish I had that time, I really do. These game designs reflect a zeitgeist that is gone, those times when that one game was the only new one you had, for months. Eye of the Beholder represents one of the better products of its time in this aspect.

After having struggled through four levels, the first two without guide and the subsequent two with one, I decided that my nerves couldn't handle more. And if I am going to play the game entirely by guide I might as well watch a let's play, right? Maybe I do mind cheating after all.

Eye of the Beholder deserves better than me. It is not a bad game, or at least it wasn't, but time has outrun it. There is not much to complain about, it's got atmosphere and fun gameplay. But also endless running down corridors feeling lost and the stress of being chased by a spider knowing its bite will be the death of you. 

So four levels down I decided it was the enough for me. Looking in the Clue Book I knew that was about a third of the game, but also that much worse (and fun) was waiting for me further down. I will regret not finishing Eye of the Beholder, or maybe I regret not being able to play it back when it was released. I am sure it would've been a great experience.

EXIT: The Game Kids - Jungle of Riddles - 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?

Cascadia - Board Game Review

 As someone who loves to play board games, but is surrounded by people who mostly don't, I am always desperate to find anything that will encourage them to want to play with me. So when my 10 yo looks over my shoulders while I am on a board game hunt and says Cascadia "looks like a fun game", the small chance of having found a board game he'd want to play was all the excuse I needed to buy it. He is an extremely picky board game player.

He is really into animals of all kinds, so I can see what caught his interest. In Cascadia you are tasked to build a park, or biome if you prefer, and meet certain requirements to make your animals thrive. In reality you can place your wildlife tokes any way you like as long as you respect the limitations on the habitat token. A bear can only go on a token with a bear on it. But if you want the big-bomba-points you want to place your tokens very carefully and thoughtfully indeed, to meet your animals needs. Bears might only want to live in pairs and hawks don't want to be near any other hawks, for instance. It all translates to having to place your tokens according to certain patterns depending on which animal it is.

The habitat tokens in turn represent different areas of nature - river, forest, mountain and so on. Each token can represent one or more such areas. The more of these areas you connect together, the more points you score at the end, of course, and is yet another variable to factor in as you expand your park.

Cascadia is a drafting game, as such a certain amount of wildlife and habitat tokens are put up on the table for the players to draft in turn. This simple system has been twisted and turned around in loads of games by now, in Cascadia the trick is that habitat tokens and wildlife tokens are put into the pool together and you need to choose one combination. The habitat token might not come with the animal token you need, but that's how it goes and adds to the strategic thinking. The draft pool gets refreshed with each draft meaning there is no "last" person left with the bottom of the barrel, a game design choice I like for this game. 

Certain habitat tokens will reward you a pine cone token if you place an animal on top of them. The pine cones can be traded in for benefits during your drafting, such as altering your options - which often comes in handy when there is yet another fox in the draft pool and you really need that last salmon to finish your run.

And that is pretty much it. The easy set up and concept lends it well for playing it even with younger children. My 5 yo can play this, with some strategic help, since the basic idea is just to put the corresponding animal on the right picture on the habitat tokens. As such it is very easy to get into while there is a lot of strategizing to do if you really want to get the big points. As with most drafting games there is tactic in choosing between whatever you need next or whatever your opponent needs next. 

Overall however I find drafting games like Cascadia to be far less antagonistic than classic games like Monopoly or Ludo. While you can try to outmaneuver your co-players by drafting what they seem to need, it is difficult to completely prevent them from making any sort of progress. For better or worse the game is more about building your biomes individually and see whoever planned it out better, and less about sticking a wrench in someone else's works. This just makes it yet another reason why it works well to play with children, in my book.

Cascadia won Adult Game of the Year 2023 award here in Sweden and I can see why. It's easy get into, it's adaptable to play with people less experienced and you can easily dig deep trenches of strategy if you are so inclined. And who doesn't enjoy building parks? Apparently my 10 yo, as it turns out he doesn't like this game either (I really do though).