Updates

Update – September 2018

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Hi everyone!

I have to say I’m quite pleased that I actually managed to get up the Mysterium post last month (even if I was cutting it a little fine in terms of date!). Summer is always a difficult time when one is busy playing in the sun and having holidays, so I feel like maybe I’m off to a good start.

So in keeping with that I’ll now announce the game for this month – Dragonology: The Game.

This is a bit more of a kids game than our last posts, but is nonetheless a really fun one. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the upcoming review!

 

Mim~

Update – August 2018

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If anyone out there is still reading or looking at this blog, then this update would be directed at you.

I realized that since my last update post I have failed completely at everything I wanted to achieve for the blog. Dave and I even talked about taking it down since neither or us were writing on it. However, as the blog represents two years of hard work together, as well as a little over one year of me writing alone with Dave doing administrative and maintenance work, we decided that we’d keep it if only for the fact that we don’t want to lose the record of the work we put in.

I had hoped that last year would be a good blog year, but suffice it to say, I had a very difficult year for a mixture of reasons and it simply didn’t happen. HOWEVER! I have a new plan. My new aim is to post once a month on a game not reviewed here before and at the same time try to research into old games and so on so that every so often I can put up a slightly different post.

I’m not going to make an official timeline or impose any strict deadlines upon myself, because I think that’s a sure way to fail. But I am going to try and refresh the blog a bit over the next two-three months, because I really miss writing on it and playing lots of board games.

Watch this space!

 

Over and out~

Mim

Update – February 2017

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It’s February!

Let’s review how well I’m doing with my New Years Blogolutions:

  1. To try and post as regularly as I can, even if it means sitting in Starbucks for five hours writing posts.

Well, I haven’t been to Starbucks, I will admit, but that’s only because there isn’t one near where I live now, and it’s very cold outside. But! I have achieved regular posting even if I haven’t achieved the desired every Sunday for Catan posts and Wednesdays for other stuff.

2. To follow through on all my plans for the year at least long enough to see if they’re worth making a permanent feature.

I’ve done okay at this one. I’ve achieved two posts for the Games You Can Make At Home series, and one Catan post, so that’s one new thing and the theme both present there! However…. I haven’t managed to research any games. Things have been busy round here and my internet access is rubbish at the moment. But I’m getting proper Wifi on the 6th, so I should be able to pick things up then!

Other update news…. The next game in line with #Discworldathon is Guards! Guards! which will (fingers crossed) be going up in the middle of the month. The re-readathon for that is being hosted by A Novel Haul here on WordPress and also Twitter with the handle @anovelhaul. So feel free to follow up on what she’s up to with the re-readathon.

That’s everything for now, if we’re lucky I’ll get a post up on Sunday, we’ll have to see.

Over and out~

Mim

Update! And Happy New Year!

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Alright everyone!

It’s January and the Twelve Games of Christmas are now finished until December. Hopefully they’ve been an entertaining interlude over the holiday, but now it’s time to get back to business!

As promised I am now going to unveil all the plans and things that we’ve been preparing for this year.

The Plans:

Aesthetic Blog Changes:

First though, for anyone who’s been on the blog regularly, they might have noticed that we’ve had a bit of a makeover. Dave took an editorial walk around the blog and we decided that it was probably time for a change. So,  there’s a new banner, which is tied into part of my plan for the year, plus there are some updates on the About page, making our About info somewhat more up-to-date.

We now have a Contact page, which is quite exciting. Our official blog email is there and that’s checked at least three times a week by me. We’d like to invite anyone reading this to contact us if there’s a game you think we should review, or if you’re developing a game and would like us to play it for you, and help promote it!

Whilst Dave was wandering around editing stuff he thought that the blog looked somewhat like it was run by a pair of goths, hence the new, slightly less gray, colour scheme.
Okay, that’s all the aesthetic changes that have been made since November, now, onto the plans for the year!

The Games and Posts-Related Plans:

As you’re all aware from my November and December Updates there are interesting things happening this year.

The first of which is the already mentioned Discworldathon, which is happening on three blogs run by my family, and a fair few others run by people I don’t really know. Over the rest of this year there will be Discworld game posts going up, approximately every other month starting this month. These will be much shorter than our previous in-depth game reviews, and more tied to the books and films. These are a side-branch of what we normally do, as we thought a little cross-genre blog interaction could be a really good and interesting thing, definitely something with potential for the future. Discworld fans, keep an eye out for those posts!

The second plan for this year is to begin research into old games, from different countries around the world. To research the cultural history of those countries, and the developments of the games that they traditionally played. To be totally honest I don’t have any idea how that’s going to pan out, or even if it’s going to work. At the moment I don’t really know how much information is available to me and I don’t have tons of time to trawl through every resource or book or whatever. So, we’ll see how that goes. My intention is to try and post one research-based post per month, focusing on one country at a time. If there’s lots of information to be had I may extend it to two months focused on the same country.

The third plan is for a series of short posts, similar in nature to those about the Games We Made making suggestions for games you can make at home if you’re bored, or if you don’t have lots of storage space for boxes and such. My idea is make a collection of paper games that can be stored flat in one big folder, or something similar. Those posts will be a little sporadic, as they’re taking the back burner to all the other stuff at the moment, but I think they’ve got potential to go on for a decent amount of time.

Lastly, Games We’re Reviewing This Year!

I hereby proclaim this to be a Settlers of Catan year! I intend to find and play every expansion and spin-off of this game series over the next twelve months. Although there are a lot, there aren’t actually enough to post a different expansion or spin-off every week for twelve months, so the Catan posts will be mixed in with other Catan-ish games that I can find over the rest of the year.

Very very lastly: I can’t promise one post every week at the moment, as I’m in the throes of moving into a new flat, which doesn’t have any wifi yet, and might not have for quite a while. So I’m going to have to borrow wifi from other people for a while, or write all the posts on my phone (which isn’t an appealing idea to me). My new years blogolutions are:

  1. To try and post as regularly as I can, even if it means sitting in Starbucks for five hours writing posts.
  2. To follow through on all my plans for the year at least long enough to see if they’re worth making a permanent feature.

That’s everything! Hopefully this wasn’t long enough to bore you, and you’re still going to come back and read our first real post of the year, whenever I get it done!

 

Christmas Update!

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The Twelve Games of Christmas Are Go!

First thing’s first. It’s the start of December and I am now going to officially announce that the Twelve Games of Christmas are going to happen again this year. We didn’t really have a theme to the games last time we did this, but this year I found myself surrounded by games that were great for kids. So an obvious theme appeared almost immediately. If you aren’t even slightly into kids games then I apologize and hope that you’ll find what I’ve got planned for the New Year more interesting!

Those plans are going to remain secret for the time being though, as they shall all be revealed in the January update post. All I’ll say is that I’m hoping for a pretty interesting/exciting board game year!

In other news avid readers (if they exist) may have noticed that we’ve changed the day and time that we post at. Statistically we realized that Sunday was the most popular day for people to view this blog. So instead of posting on Monday evenings at 8pm we’ve decided to try out posting on Sunday mornings at 10am so see if it makes any kind of a difference. Aside from that not much else has changed.

Enjoy Christmas, and the posts that go up in the interim!

Over and out,

Miriam

Update – PLANS!

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So since my last update post I’ve successfully posted…. 1 game. :/

This is a little underwhelming I know. But I have been formulating a plan in the time since then, and I promise it doesn’t involve every second post being an update! The first part of the plan involves my sister, Bex, blogging about books over at anarmchairbythesea, and Terry Pratchett, well-known author of the Discworld series of books, among other things.

The second part of the plan involves Christmas!

A little explanation is in order? Perhaps.

I don’t want to say too much in case of two things;

  1. I fail epically at making any of this happen, OR,
  2. I fail at making you (the reader) excited about it, and therefore unlikely to return to read the fruit of these plans.
Part 1:

A basic sum-up of the plan can, however, be given. The part involving Bex goes like this: she’s organizing and partially hosting a Discworld Readathon or ‘Discworldathon’ (as she’s taken to calling it) on her blog, starting in January and continuing for one full year with each month having a Discworld-novel theme.
Since Terry Pratchett also authorized the creation of several board games based on the books, which we have already reviewed on this blog (the reviews can be read here) we thought it could be a nice idea to tie in the Discworldathon with some kind of replay or re-enjoyment of the related games. As of now we’re not 100% sure what the best way to work this out is, but we’re theorizing and planning and scheming and such, and we’ll undoubtedly come up with something.

Part 2:

This is the part of the plan involving Christmas. As some avid and dedicated readers may remember we did a series of posts entitled “Twelve Games of Christmas” in 2013. These, based on the statistics of the site, were quite popular. So I intend to bring them back this year. I’m hoping to be organized enough to make this possible, and I’ve already compiled a list of potential games to use for this.

That about sums up everything that’s in the works at the moment, and my hope is that even if posting is sporadic there should be a decent amount of posts going up around Christmas and some definite ones happening in the New Year in connection to Bex’s Discworldathon.

That’s everything for now, and I sincerely hope that my next post is not an update!

Miriam

Let’s Try Again!

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Hi everyone!

It’s been five days shy of two years since a new post went up on here, and it’s definitely time to refresh this space. A lot has happened in the two years since we’ve posted anything. The most key of these things being that Dave and I no longer live in the same country, making writing a blog together somewhat more challenging.

However! Given that I currently have a decent amount of free time I’m going to try and start posting again. Dave will still be helping, but in a purely administrative kind of way, so if you liked his posts more than mine, unfortunately you’re out of luck.

I have the good intention of posting my first new post next Monday evening. Fingers crossed I can keep to that. We used to post regularly on a Monday evening, but although I would like to be able to post once a week again, realistically I don’t know yet whether or not I can organize enough people here in Austria to make this possible.

But in the interests of keeping update posts short and sweet watch this space next Monday evening for a post about a pretty good game called Village.

Over and out – Mim

Update – August 2014

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A Change In Form:

So we’re changing our format a touch! Or at least we’re going with what we feel like for now and we will review how well it works later and make changes accordingly. Instead of having a themed month and reviewing four to five games that fit into that theme we’re going to have just the one game for a month. We’re going to play the game multiple times and do one review in the same format as we used to that covers the game in a basic form, then we’re going to play it in different ways or play it in all its scenarios (depending on the format of the game) and review each scenario or form of play individually.

Hopefully this will result in a more in-depth look at the game, leave us with a greater understanding/appreciation for the game and allow us to actually comment on real strategy rather than having to say things like “we’re not sure as we’ve only played it twice but we think this might work <insert vague suggestion here>”.

So on that note, the game that shall start this change in form is the wonderful…

Memoir ’44:

IMAG2892
The game and rule book.

This game we first played at the UK Games Expo in May, you can see us playing a huge expo variation of the game in our Expo video here. We loved it immediately and bought it at the Expo. As some of you will be aware it has the same designer as the game Battle Cry: the almighty Richard Borg. We have already reviewed Battle Cry and that review can be seen here.

So strap in for a whole month of us going on about this game, analyzing every scenario, and even looking at the actual history of the given scenarios. We will also be keeping a running score at the bottom of each scenario post so you can tell which of us is getting better at the game, each of us will get 1 point for a loss, 2 for a draw and 3 for a win. By the end of the month it’ll be probably be clear which of us has the more strategic mind.

Other Things to Note:

  • We are actually back now and should be back for the foreseeable future.
  • Hopefully, with this whole month being about Memoir ’44, we should get our first video review up about it, so that should be exciting.
  • With there being more posts going up than there used to be (there should be at least 18 going up this month because there are 16 scenarios in Memoir ’44 plus this post and the over all review) it will be harder to commit to specific publications dates. We’ll say that Mondays will stay a sure thing, but depending on the game for the month (and how many posts it’ll take) we can’t be sure how regularly the in between posts will be going up.

Update – We’re both back!

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So as you’re all aware from Dave’s updates, I’ve been out and about in Europe for the last month or so with a friend. But I’m back now and we’re ready to get the blog back on schedule(ish) for the rest of the summer!

However, whilst on our travels, Rosie and I have come across, and played, many a game. Some that we’ve already reviewed, like Cripple Mr Onion. But other (more interesting games) that we found in hostels we stayed in, such as Pandemic! (Turns out we’re terrible at this game, we’re just too good at destroying all of humanity…) So below are a few photos of the game related things that we did:

This was waiting for us (by my bed) in the hostel in Stockholm, the first city we visited, because we’re both terrible at maths, we didn’t play it.

 

For some reason, it won't let me turn it the right way up...
For some reason, it won’t let me turn it the right way up…

In between Mathable and the next photo we also managed to play English Scrabble with a German Scrabble set. Needless to say scoring was interesting. Unfortunately, we forgot to take photos. 😦

Switzerland appears to have been the best country for board games in the hostels, most of the other places had chess, Copenhagen did have a few other interesting-looking games, but they were mostly in Danish, which neither of us could speak or read.

We found this in the hostel in Zurich:

PANDEMIC! It's a race to save humanity
PANDEMIC! It’s a race to save humanity

We freaked out a few people sharing the common area with us for the five hours that we spent playing this. Apparently we were taking saving the world from four deadly diseases far too seriously…

Also in Zurich I wanted to get this for Dave:

Because it's just beautiful, as chess sets go
Because it’s just beautiful, as chess sets go

But it was a little out of my price range. He got a bar of Toblerone instead.

From Zurich we headed to Bern, and in Bern we found (but didn’t get a photo of) a giant Nine Men’s Morris set, an outdoor one, like the chess sets they have in schools and parks. It was awesome. But we also managed to play Mastermind in Bern, albeit, with a set that was missing a few pieces…

Slightly makeshift game of Mastermind
Slightly makeshift game of Mastermind

Once again, we apologize for the slightly hiatus in posts, but we’re hoping to be back on track, spamming you all with geeky board game reviews within the next few days!

Update – We’re Back…Well Sort Of!

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I’m back (David). Having finished wandering around Wales I’m back and hopefully ready to get back on schedule.

This is what Wales looked like!
This is what Wales looked like!

Unfortunately my sister is still wandering around Europe somewhere but I should still be able to get us back on track. I will make sure reviews go up on Mondays and hopefully the ones we missed will go up in between. Until then heres a nice video I made of my time in Wales, its mostly just shots of various animals and no games at all. But for people who like that kind of thing should be nice, also for people who like that kind of thing they should check out my girlfriends blog on nature stuff Here!