Review: Calico, Cascadia and Verdant

This video is surely proof of SU&SD’s dedication to board game review technology. In the above video we’ve managed to compress no less than three reviewers and three reviews of Flatout Games’ Calico, Cascadia and Verdant.

But that’s not all! You’ve heard her on the pod, you’ve partaken of her written words, but this video represents the team’s own Ava Foxfort’s very first video review. Everybody, please join me in wishing her a the warmest of SU&SD welcomes.

Ava, if you’re reading this? You’re a gem. A gem we’ve socketed into our crown, and you know what? We don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it.

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Review – Summoner Wars 2nd Edition

When was the last time you had a good summon? It’s been too long, hasn’t it?

In that case, may we recommend the brand-spanking new edition of Summoner Wars, which is also now playable online? It’s got goblins. It’s got magic spells. It’s got plenty of charming fantasy art. And most importantly, it has a swanky, simple little ruleset that’s easy to learn and hard to master.

In fact, we like this game so much we’ve now reviewed it twice. I’m not going to go back and watch our original 2011 review because I would die instantly, but if you want to do so then that is a choice that you can make.

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Review – Anomia

Following last week’s review of Decrypto, this week we’re revisiting another brilliant game that had previously been wasting away in the dungeons of Shut Up & Sit Down in a written review.

Anomia might not be the funniest game we’ve ever covered if you were to judge it in terms of decibels, but it is the game we’ve reviewed that gets the most people laughing the hardest the fastest.

Does that sentence make sense? We’re not sure. We just know that this game is ace.

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Review – Unmatched

We’ve got two questions for you. Did you see this year’s Undaunted review? And do you want another great 2 player game with “Un” in the name?

Unmatched is a bewitchingly sexy game to collect, it’s a fab little fighting game, and it takes just 20 minutes to finish a whole game. Unless you include the rules explanation, then it takes just 22 minutes.

Enjoy, everybody!

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Review – Undaunted: Normandy

Do you like GUNS? Do you like CARDS? Do you like GRIEF?

If the answer to any of those questions is “Kind of?”, you’ve got to check out Undaunted: Normandy. Not only is it the greatest World War 2 game to come out in forever, it’s deliciously cheap.

What else is there to say? Except, of course, that we could not be more excited for Undaunted: North Africa later this year.

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Review: Bärenpark – The Bad News Bears

While Quintin takes a couple of weeks off, Matt dives into a world of BEARYTALE IMAGINATION. There’s no-one else here to keep an eye on things, so the gloves are fully off when it comes to awful puns.

Expanding upon the legacy of Barenpark with bigger, badder bears and beautiful 3D monorails – this expansion certainly fills a box that’s almost the same size as the basic game, but can The Bad News Bears fill the same size in our massive, empty hearts?

Review: Detective Club

Ben: Picture the scene: you are in an art gallery. The curator asks you to pick two paintings that match a specific word. They won’t, however, tell you what that word is. You run off and pick two different paintings; one of a horse, the other of an apple in a window. The curator then tells you the word they were thinking of was “escape”, and asks you why on earth you picked those two paintings.

Welcome to the most unusual club in the world!

Detective Club is a party game that sees 4-8 players trying to match fabulous picture cards to different words. Each round, a different player will choose a word, write it on all but one of the adorable tiny notebooks the game comes with, shuffles them, and deals them out. Can you see where this is going?

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Review: Combo Fighter

As anyone who’s seen us at conventions will know, it’s hard for team SU&SD to spend a day out and about without getting into a punching fight or muscle demonstration.

As such, it was only natural that we’d review Combo Fighter. An expandable, simple card game about kicking bottom, and a glorious team effort between designer Asger Johansen and artist Snorre Krogh. If you like the sound of a lightning-fast 1 vs 1 game that’s more intelligent than it has any right to be, do take a closer look.

(And if you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, check out our impressions of Critical Mass on podcast #84.)

Have a great weekend, everybody!

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Review: Le Havre

Ava: Le Havre could be the perfect resource shuffling game. It’s a tightly wound knot of decisions and possibilities, that unfurls and unwraps as you play.

An elaborate and ever-increasing roster of buildings offers ways to process, use, acquire and sell as many goods as you can. Tiny, square, double-sided tokens flood the board, spilling out of warehouses that heave with potential, begging for you to grab them before someone else does.

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