Daniel J Isom

August was another breeze, ending as quickly as it started. Working from home for over three months came to an end, but not before we filled the month with adventures. We took a week long trip to North Carolina to visit family, visited the Museum of Illusions in Philadelphia for James' birthday, did an augmented reality experience in Lancaster with my mom and her husband for the kids' collective birthdays, and saw a couple of movies in theaters (including one during a date night for Christine and I). The school year starts tomorrow and I'm ready to get back into our normal routines. Blah Blog Log July 2024 Wrap-Up  - More gaming, a work trip that had an interesting experience, and a lot of good food. An Apology  - I said sorry for not staying in touch with people in my life. Bored  Board Games One of my favorite casual games ( Mountain Goats ) along with a couple games I just received in the mail ( Grove & Forage ) were just added to BGA, so those fueled a lot of the...

Another Carcassonne game I got in the same trade as the last one was  New World: A Carcassonne Game . Like many of the games in the line, player take turns placing a single tile to an ever changing landscape, building towns, roads, and other parts of a countryside. After placing the tile, the player can choose to put one of their meeples on that tile as they try to score the most points by game's end. When a road or town is completed, the player with the most meeples on that scoring section gets the points. If two players tie for the most, both players get the points. The game ends when all of the tiles have been place. Sounds like every other Carcassonne game right? Well...yeah, but then there are some twists. The big twist in this game is that players start on the east coast and have to build going west. In the original and most others, players build from a single tile in the middle of the table. With this, there are 8 tiles connected to the score board that players have to start...

  Another one of my super value clearance buys was Museum , a card collecting game of drafting and set collection. It retails around $50 but I was able to get a copy for only $10. I figured it was definitely worth a shot, as I had it on my wishlist at one time previously. Players act as curators of their own museums trying to collect and display relics in their growing collection. Beyond the value on each relic added to a player's collection, there are a many other ways to score at the end of the game. The player who creates the most valuable collection is declared the winner.  At the start of a player's turn they draft a card from one of the four continent decks and add that card to their hand. Then they have two options: furbish their museum or perform an inventory. If a player chooses to furbish their museum, that means they're adding something to their museum, either a relic or an expert. In either case, they are spending the value of relics in their hand to pay for t...

  Carcassonne has been one of my favorite games for many years now. It's been continually in my top 10 and I believe the base game plus the first two expansions is the closest thing to a perfect game that you can find. Because I think you can never have enough Carc in your life, I've started to acquire other versions of the game. They follow many of the same rules, but have their own wrinkles from game to game. Recently I was able to trade for two different versions and got one of them to the table right away.  Carcassonne: Over Hill and Dale has a slightly different setting from the original where players are building farms rather than cities. There are still roads in the form of paths, but stables take the place of monasteries. Not having the fields scoring option makes the gameplay less aggressive and explains why players start with less meeples to place throughout the game.  Just like in the original game, players draw and place tiles to the board on their turn. Then...

Flatout Games , the publisher and game design lab, have been absolutely on fire over the past few years. Cascadia is the second game that's been published by them, after the amazing Calico in 2020. The CoLab (made up of members Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich) have had five other games published by various publishers, including one of my favorite card games in Point Salad. As a publisher they have done a wonderful job with their first two games. The gameplay and components of both Calico and Cascadia are just so satisfying. Teaming up with Beth Sobel as the artist for both allows for beautiful looking games. Cascadia is a tile laying puzzle game from Randy Flynn, that involves drafting tiles and adding them to your personal board. When drafting a tile, players also draft the animal token that is paired with it. When the tile is added to the player's board, the tile has to go on an unoccupied tile with the matching animal on it. The object of the game is to ...

Barnes and Noble had some crazy clearance recently at our local store and one of the games I picked up was Lanterns Dice: Lights in the Sky . This is the dice version of the fairly popular, Lanterns , which was released in 2015. I still own the original and covered it in this post from 2017 where I recapped all of my unplayed games that got played that year. This dice version of the game was released in 2019 by the same publisher (Foxtrot Games/Renegade Games Studio), but was designed by a different designer (Chris Bryan) who designed a game I really enjoy called Favelas.  Lanterns Dice: Lights in the Sky is a roll and write game for 2 to 4 players that takes 30-45 minutes to play. The object of the game is to score the most points through a series of three different scoring methods. Coloring in multiple pools into various shapes allows the active played to cover those spaces with fireworks tiles to score points according to the value on the tile. The earlier the tiles get claimed...

  I'm always in the market for games that feature "cards with numbers". I grew up playing a lot of games using a traditional deck of cards and games like UNO and 5 Alive. So games like PUSH tend to remind me of those times. I like a themed game as much as the next person, but I'm also perfectly content playing games that just have simple art and do something interesting. They may not always be the most strategic, but that doesn't mean they can't be fun. I've found that these types of games work really well with casual gamers and not so well with our current group. You may remember that it happened with a similar game, L.L.A.M.A. , toward the end of last year. PUSH is fairly simple and very straightforward push your luck game. On a player's turn they have two options: 1) draw cards from the deck and add them to one of their piles (max of 3) OR 2) bank all of the cards of one color so they're safe. When adding cards to the piles, players can't a...

  The Pandemic series is far and away the most popular set of cooperative games in the tabletop gaming. Since the original came out in 2008, 12 different versions of the game with various themes and styles of play. Pandemic: Hot Zone - North America is a stripped down version of the original that focuses solely on North America instead of the whole world. It's marketed as a shorter, more portable version that plays in roughly 30 minutes. This is accomplished by reducing the size of the map, number of diseases that need to be cured, and having a much smaller deck of cards.  It normally retails for $20, but was able to pick this up for only $7 on Amazon. It's hard to pass on almost any new game for that price, but it's a no brainer when one comes from a well respected series. As promised, the game plays pretty quickly but I think it's over way too fast. You don't really get time to take in what's happening, as you jump right into damage control. From a thematic ...

  I don't have a lot of unplayed games left in my collection and technically My Little Scythe is in the kids' collection. It's the kids version of the Scythe , a game I've written about here previously. Wanting to bring something new to the group that they might actually enjoy, I figured it was time to take this out of the shrink wrap so I can learn it now that Grace is at the minimum suggested age to play. It's more complex than many mass market kids games you'll find on shelves at stores like Walmart or Target. The game has an origin story that is really cute. The long and short of it is that a father made made a My Little Pony version of Scythe so his then 6 year old daughter could play with him. You can read an interview that goes into more detail here . In this more accessible and adorable version of Scythe, players race to be the first to claim 4 trophies from 8 possible categories. On each player's turn, they will choose one of three actions: move, s...

In another attempt to combine a couple of recipes to make a single meal, I chose to make a rice salad and pair it with fish. I love rice and can't recall ever eating a cold version of it with a dressing, so I was very interested to see if this could be a new summer salad that's sans mayo. In place of a mayo forward dressing it a mixture of oils, vinegar, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper. I thought the dressing tasted pretty darn good on it's own and might make a nice marinade for chicken. The salad is a 1:1 combination of wild and white rice that get cooked separately due to their cooking times being different. Some fresh parsley, celery, and red onion round it out. Everything gets tossed together and dressed before going into the fridge too become cold. I've always wanted to start cooking more fish for dinners, so I was excited to try out this more of a technique than a recipe way of cooking whatever fish looked good at the store. Christine tends to like more mild, white...

Part of my 2021 New Year's Goals trading, selling, or donating my board games to get them down to a more thoughtful and reasonable for me size. After acquiring and adoring FORT , I knew it was time to pass along it's predecessor, SPQF. Finding someone to trade it to, let alone buy it, now that the new version of it was out was a bit of a task. However, I was able to find a fellow fan of Grant's (the designer) that was interested. He didn't have anything on my wish list, but I went through his for trade list and came across Nations: The Dice Game . I've always wanted to play more civilization games, but they tend to be very long and complex. This is the complete opposite of that while also looking like it would give a similar feeling.  Nations: The Dice Game is the streamlined version of Nations that uses dice instead of cards. Not having played the latter I can't speak to how they compare, but I heard good things the reviews and playthrough videos. The object of...

Steve Finn, designer of The Whatnot Cabinet and many other games, caught my attention many years ago with arguably his best design, Biblios . It's one of my favorite games that, if you read this blog, is always coming up in my top games posts. Ever since, I've kept an eye out for whatever he's working on and have played quite a few of his published designs, from his own publishing house or others. The Whatnot Cabinet was Kickstarted by the latter, Pencil First Games . Over the past few years, Steve and Pencil First Games have published a handful of games together. When I saw this combo putting out a drafting and set collection design with an interesting action selection mechanic, it was an instant-back for me. In The Whatnot Cabinet, players take turns drawing two tiles in various ways and add them to their player board a.k.a. Whatnot Cabinet. The object is to place various shapes and colors into the rows and columns to score the most amount of points. During setup there a...

  The final game in the small box set is the area-majority, dice rolling game Sequoia . In this game, players secretly roll 5 dice each, make two pairs and leave out one of the dice. All players reveal their pairs and assign one of their tree tokens to the value on each of their pairs. After all players have placed their 20 tree pieces across the 10 different spaces, each one is scored. The player with the most tree tokens on a space gets the first place points and the player with the second most gets the second place points. Any other players get no points. The player with the most points at the end of the game is the winner. It's an incredibly quick and easy game that anyone can learn in less than a minute. On it's face, Sequoia seems like a luckfest with area control. However, there are a couple of things that really need to be considered when playing. The first is that the points for each of the 10 spaces are randomly assigned at the beginning of the game.  Players should ...

  The second game from the Kickstarter I backed was Mountain Goats , a king of the hill, dice rolling game. Two to five players take a set of adorable goat meeples and put one at the bottom of each column. On a player's turn, they roll the four dice and then group the dice in any combination. It could be 4 separate dice, 2 paired with 2 separate, 3 together with separate, etc. Players move their goats up one space for every group that matches the number on that column. When a goat gets to the top of a column, they get a point token equal to the number of that row, if available. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins. What makes the game really interesting are the choices you're forced to make after your dice rolls. If another player is currently at the top of a column, it would behoove you to claim that spot and send their goat back to the bottom. However, if you were already at the top of a column and rolled that column's value, it's guaranteed po...

  I backed a three pack of small box games on Kickstarter that looked like they'd be right up my alley. I thought about reviewing each one in the same post, but figured it'd end up being too long. So this will be first of three reviews that will go up over the next few days.  GPS  is a racing game that utilizes a spinner, something normally found in kids and mass produced family games. The objective is to get your numbered satellites in sequential order from the starting point around the board. It's a re-implementation of the game Finito! that uses a twenty sided die instead of the spinner.  Players begin the game with 3 of their 12 satellite tiles face up and then the spinner gets spun. Players choose one of their face up satellites to go in that spot and then flip over another tile at random. This spinning and placing happens 12 times, so that all of the players' satellites are around the board. Then players spin the ship and move any of their tiles to that new spa...

My group tends to like puzzly games, so I'm always on the lookout for something new that we'll enjoy. I've been seeing a lot of Nine Tiles Panic , and other Oink Games, on Twitter over the past year or so. The Japanese publisher has become very popular by releasing quirky, small boxes games. This is a real-time, pattern building and tile laying game, where players are trying to score points according to three objective cards that are drawn each round. When a player or players cross the scoring threshold to end the game, the player with the most point wins.  Each player gets a matching set of 9 double-sided tiles that show various roads and icons. All of the roads must lead out of a player's "town" in order to score any of the objective cards. The choice of what sides of the tiles to have face up could be most dogs, longest road, most burgers on a single road, etc. The player that does the best at each objective scores the most points and each player after them...

I saw the movie World War Z in theaters and thought it was entertaining, but generally a bad movie overall. It's like they were able to land Brad Pitt and just abandoned what could have been an amazing compilation of shorter stories all tied into one movie. That's to say, I enjoyed the book immensely and think it's superior to the movie in every way. There are definitely small parts of some of the stories that get worked into the movie. However, I would have rather seen the stories of the many characters you meet throughout. This book is written in such a way that I've never encountered. Instead of it being from a protagonists point of view or that of a narrator's, it's a series of interviews. Sometimes there are a handful of questions being answered and other times a character just tells a story. It's a fascinating way to recount a fictional storyline. The interviewer travels all over the world to find out how various countries dealt with The Great Panic a...

The last previously unplayed game that we played recently was It's A Wonderful World . I first learned about this game when somebody compared it to Res Arcana , a game I really like. They both feature drafting, hand management, variable player powers, and end game bonuses. They're both resource producing games but use those resources in different ways. Gamenight! on Board Game Geek did a play through of it, so I decided to check it out (Deborah Ann Woll being in the episode had nothing to with it, I swear). After watching it, I added it to my wish list and ended up receiving it for Christmas from my other sister-in-law and her husband.  The game plays 1 to 5 players and plays in 30 to 60 minutes. I think we were a little over 60 minutes in our initial play of it, but like many drafting games you'll get your time down significantly with multiple plays as you learn the cards. Each player takes a role of one of the five empires looking to expand their production power and rul...

Tumble Town is another previously unplayed game that saw the table recently. I backed this on Kickstarter because I didn't have many dice heavy games and this looked like something our group would really enjoy. Another thing that drew me to the campaign was the designer, Kevin Russ. I had already backed, and was waiting for his other game, Calico , which looked fantastic. I figured that if Calico was as good as I assumed it would be (it's freaking amazing) then I would enjoy this design as well. Tumble Town is on the lighter side of things (game complexity weight of 2.0 out of 5 on BGG), but like Calico, it has much more depth than one might think at first glance. It plays 1 to 4 players in about 45 minutes and we found that timing to be about right for 4 players. The theme of the game is building the best western town that you can. As the mayor, you decide what buildings will be added to your town's main street. On your turn, you select a building plan from one of three r...

Instead of my normal end of the year Unplayed Games Recap post, this year I've decided to do mini reviews of games I've played for the first time after adding them to my collection. This past weekend we played three previously unplayed games and Lost Cities: The Board Game was one of them. I got this game for Christmas almost as gag gift. My sister-in-law and I like to try and make the other lose "the game" and she knew seeing the words "lost, the, and game" would surely trigger my brain into losing. If you've never heard about this, I'm very sorry but now you're playing and will be until you die. Now that you're cursing my name for making you lose, let's get back to the review. Lost Cities: The Board Game came out 9 years after the original Lost Cities game came out. The Board Game version plays two to four players in about 30 minutes for the one round short version and about 60 minutes for the three round long version. It uses a the...