Hello everyone! The weekend sure flashed by. Yesterday I had a lovely day of playing board games with some friends. It reminded me all the more just how much joy you can have sitting at a table and playing some “offline” games with one another.

Board games

We played three games. First was Overboss, which is a spin-off of the card game Boss Monster, which has you build a kingdom to “conquer the overworld”. The subtitle for the game is that this is supposed to be a Boss Monster Adventure. But it’s actually just a “city” builder kind of game. It sure didn’t feel very adventurous. On top of that we only played the tutorial that utilized maybe half of the game assets, so we weren’t exactly blown away. Especially because it was just each player building their kingdoms seperately, without any further interaction.

The second game we played quickly grew to be one of my favourites. It’s called Harmonies and it’s all about building ecosystems for creatures to live in. There are different tiles to build your biomes, from water to mountains and plains. Depending on the patterns you create you can host different types of creatures. Each turn you can choose three tiles to add to your land and it is a matter of tactically placing your tiles and planning a bit ahead to maximize the amount of creatures you can host. You then get points for both the landscape you created and the amount of creatures you managed to host. On top of that the art direction looks really good. Even though there’s not much interaction with other players as well, you still get a sense of competition in building the best landscape and snatching tiles from other players before they can use it to score more points.

Finally we played a game that’s called Kwakzalvers van Kakelenburg (The Quacks of Quedlinburg in English) which pits players against one another to brew the best potions in nine rounds of gameplay. It calls itself a Bag building game, because after each round you can buy new ingredients to add to your bag and you pull these blindly. But if you get too much ingredients that make your potion explode, you lose the round and are not allowed to continue to brew. It’s a very competitive game and also a very strategic game. Each ingredient has different properties and if that wasn’t enough, there are four different properties per ingredient, so you can mix things up in many ways! Last night’s match was as exciting as ever, as we are now quite experienced players!

New blog drops this week

Besides my enthusiasm for board games, I am also eager to write a new blog this week. I am not 100% sure what it will be about, but usually once I sit down and start writing something pops up that seems relevant at the time. I haven’t really spoken about it much since I started blogging again this year, but the current geopolitical situation is something that keeps us all busy and I sometimes find myself struggling to keep up. But the big question really should be “Should we keep up?” (Social) media consumption is best kept in check for your own sake and mental stability, and this is a topic I have some experience with. Even to the point where I am considering quitting some social media, or putting even bigger time restraints on using them. That is not to say that I don’t think it’s important to keep up with global news at all, but there’s a very fine line between staying informed and consuming so much that it starts to have negative effects on you mentally, or even physically!

So, as you can see something popped up as I wrote that paragraph. 😉 A special thanks to my muse!

Have a good one peeps!

Jeffrey