Growing up in a family of six we basically had two staple board games: Pay Day and The Game of Life. The former instilled a vast distrust of the lottery in me at a young age and the latter taught me about the inevitability of taxes. Either way, I have a fondness for both games, even if they don't live up to modern board game expectations. Adulthood, Johnny O'Neal's latest offering from Brotherwise Games, does its best to capture the unexpectedness of life and those nostalgic vibes.

Adulthood Overview

Just like the real world, Adulthood is about investing your Time, Energy, and Money into various activities that will maximize your Happiness and Impact. Something new is always on the horizon whether it be a new love interest, exciting career, or worthwhile experiences that shape the path of your life's journey.

During a player's turn, they assign their purple Time tokens to any activities on their player board. Additionally, if any of the actions have other costs associated with them, they must also be paid at this time. Once actions are declared, each one is played out in whatever order the player sees fit, gaining any relevant resources or cards as indicated.

Once actions have been taken, the player drafts a card from the Market, representing their growth…

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[caption id="attachment_301989" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Box Cover[/caption]

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Emperor's New Clothes is an art project that claims to be a game. It is not a game, it is a collection of blank, stark-white game pieces that could be used to create a game, I suppose. But that is not really the point. The point is the joke.

If you do not get the joke, then I highly recommend…

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About two years ago, my buddy Johnivan showed up at a game night with a copy of the 2015 co-op game Healthy Heart Hospital. The cover looks like a newspaper ad out of the 1950s, right down to the game’s tagline, “Don’t miss a beat!” written in script just below the title.

We didn’t get to play Healthy Heart Hospital that night, but Johnivan still opened up the box and showed me the components. It was basic-looking stuff but I loved the retro-style art, and the package looked like something that could use an upgrade. When Tabletop Tycoon reached out to offer a review copy of the new version of this game, I remembered Johnivan’s copy and offered to cover the new edition.

Healthy Heart Hospital (Third Edition) is the 2023 update of the 2015 original, with that 2015 version based on an earlier game called Triage. The art style has been altered to a much more generic looking game that has the look of something like TV hospital dramas such as General Hospital and St. Elsewhere, but as if these shows appeared on Lifetime.

If you are going to try Healthy Heart Hospital, this edition is the way you want to do it. But…do you want to do it?

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I can remember several days in my personal history with Apples to Apples, such as the first time I played it and discovered that party games do not have to feel devoid of intellectual stimulation; the first time someone had some serious unintended innuendo come about with a play of a card. There was the time one of my best friends made a ten minute argument as to why Michael Jackson was the trump card in this game (i.e., he fits any nearly any adjective that can be played, and he fits them better than just about any other card could). But the one that I remember most was the day Apples to Apples started to wane in my game group’s rotation. More on that last date later; for now, let’s talk about what makes Apples to Apples tick.

The Game

Apples to Apples is, quite honestly, as simple as a game can get.

Players are dealt seven ‘red’ apple cards which have nouns printed on them (i.e., a person, place, thing, or event).

[caption id="attachment_296781" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A noun is a person, place, or thing.[/caption]

Players rotate being the judge, who will draw one ‘green’ apple card which has an adjective printed on it (i.e., a characteristic of a person,…

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Tales from the Tavern

A group of evil monsters has stolen all the drinks in the land of Barcadia, and now it’s up to your merry band of adventurers to brave the dungeon and recover all the drinks. Or… something like that. Heroes of Barcadia is less about the narrative and more about the laughs and, of course, the drinks. What exactly is it, then?

Well, it’s a dungeon-crawling game for 2-6 players (or up to 8 with the expansion), but unlike many dungeon-crawlers, you’re in direct competition. These other heroes are not your allies; they are your rivals! After all, what good is recovering the lost hoard of stolen drinks if it’s not you getting all the glory? You’ll take turns exploring the dungeon to find power-ups and slay monsters. Once you have three power-ups, you can try to take on the final boss and recover the drink hoard.

As a game, it’s… pretty basic. Heroes of Barcadia keeps the gameplay dead simple. There’s very little room for strategy. The rooms you uncover, the power-ups you get, and the dice you roll to fight the monsters are all random. You have little control over your destiny here. It is less of a game and more of a classed-up, shiny new way to have fun with your friends and…

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They had me with the cover art.

With the release of Trolls & Princesses, Game Brewer has once again given the world a fantastic physical production. The publisher, known for Eurogame titles like Oak, Paris, Stroganov, Gentes, and Gùgōng, always nails the look: great components, clean box covers, sharp visuals, and games that might lean a little too hard into language-free iconography.

I have played Gentes and Oak, and enjoyed both games. With Trolls & Princesses, I raised my hand to cover this game right away thanks to the comical cover art of a nasty-looking troll holding a human baby and carting a princess (with a miffed look on her face) off to do who-knows-what. It’s a hard image to shake, which told me I needed to play the game.

Trolls & Princesses is interesting. As great as it looks, everyone who sat with me for plays (each of my plays took place with three players) came away from the game impressed by the production and amused by the game’s theme. But as a game, Trolls & Princesses mostly left players at “yeah, OK, that was fun” and not much more excited than that.

Part of the reason: the princesses.

“Church Bells, Changelings and Outposts” Doesn’t…

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How do you rate a board game like Monikers? Much like Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind, which took an old theatre camp game and committed it to paper, Monikers is a curated rendition of an old favorite. I have always called it Salad Bowl. You may know it as The Name Game, The Hat Game, Celebrities, or a number of other options. How do you review something that’s always been there? How, exactly, does one review Charades?

A Rose by Any Other Moniker

In the traditional game, the first stage involves handing out slips of paper and pens, on which everyone writes a word. These can be famous people, events, concepts, whatever you want, really. Like most party games, the exact parameters are up to the group.

Monikers elides that. The box is full of cards with pre-printed prompts, like Oprah, The Kraken, A Russian Nesting Doll. You know, the classics. From there, the structure is identical to the original game. In lieu of pieces of paper, each player is dealt a pile of cards, from which they choose whichever appeal to them. Those cards are shuffled into a deck, which is set in the…

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Maybe it says something about my personality, the speed with which I leapt at the chance to review Deadly Dowagers. Two to six players compete as Victorian dowagers to accumulate a dowry sufficient to attract a Duke by investing in properties and “strategic serial marriages.” It is a satirical card game of murder and manipulation. Sounds like a ripping good time, doesn’t it? 

Designed by Sarah Shipp with art by Mercedes Palacios, Sparkworks (Panorama and the Princess Bride series of games) has a fitting release for International Womens’ Day. 

“Darling, could you fetch the cake knife?”

Deadly Dowagers plays over an unspecified number of rounds until someone marries the Duke and rides off into the suspiciously blood-stained sunset. Each round consists of four phases: The first is a Draft in which players select one card from a dwindling hand and pass the rest, collecting four altogether. The second involves playing cards into a tableau as Investments. The third is the Husband phase where you might marry or, if already married, arrange for the untimely death of said husband, or perhaps marry and kill on the same turn. Or neither. (You know how fickle these affairs can be.) The final “phase” is hardly a phase at all beyond reminding everyone that no more than three cards may remain in hand…

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‘Neath the Eyeball of Saint Isidore

We all had to memorize the opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue from Canterbury Tales, right? Eighteen lines of Middle English poetry—and one gigantic run-on sentence at that! English teachers love that sort of thing. For those who may have forgotten or been spared altogether, I’ll summarize. It’s April and Nature has pricked the conscience of various pilgrims to strike out on the road toward Canterbury to make all matters of the soul right once again. 

Such is the setting of the 2011 classic The Road to Canterbury. Upon reading that designer Alf Seegert’s graduate degrees include both Philosophy and English, the subject material and its treatment suddenly makes sense. The road is darkly endearing, a demonstration of more than a working knowledge of Mr. Chaucer with just enough humor to be approachable.

Where Chaucer introduces two dozen (or so) pilgrims, Seegert’s creation zooms in on one—the Pardoner. The game is limited to either two or three players, both or all of whom assume the role of a Pardoner straddling the penitential fence. The two tasks at hand are to tempt pilgrims unto one of the seven deadly sins while simultaneously taking a financial interest in issuing something of a bogus absolution. There are Relics to relish. Sinners will die. Someone will be declared…

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My two kids, ages 8 and 5, love games. I usually steer them towards family games, particularly games that align with my 5-year-old son so that all of us can play together. Bonus points if the game is cooperative, because my son still can’t deal with losing.

My hope is that one day, my kids can scale up to, say, Brass: Lancashire or a light Lacerda, like Vinhos: Deluxe Edition. For now, games like The Quest Kids and Turtle Mania do the job for family play, but I am just setting the table for the days when I can try to go toe-to-toe with my kids in a medium weight Euro puzzle.

But let’s imagine my kids were, say, 12 and 9. First Rat (2022, Pegasus Spiele) might be the perfect game for what I’m trying to build towards, a game that rewards efficiency, timing, and has the production elements I look for in a Eurogame experience. Plus, you’ve got some of the hallmarks of standard Euro fare: scoring tracks, variable player powers, resource gathering, milestones, and the like.

Combine all of that with rats and a game board that reminds older players of a darkly-shaded version of Candy Land, and you’ve got something that will really shine with parents who want their…

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At the Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

Starting in Hollywood’s silent era, film studios created double bills,  or pairs of films shown to provide a full evening’s worth of entertainment. The first film of these Double Features was the main feature, the longer film with the biggest stars, or the A Movie. The second, shorter film with lesser-known actors, became known as the B Movie.

By the 1940s B Movies were becoming their own genre of films. Moving away from low-budget versions of their counterparts, B Movies took on “topical issues”—frequently sordid and controversial topics featuring violence and prison. This led to the teen movie craze and cheap horror films of the 1950s with titles like “I Walked With a Zombie”, “The Body Snatcher”, and “I was a Teenage Werewolf.”

[caption id="attachment_257647" align="aligncenter" width="306"] B Movies: The Box[/caption]

The undisputed King of the B Movies was Roger Corman. Corman’s filmography has some amazing titles: She Gods of Shark Reef; Teenage Caveman; A Bucket of Blood; X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes; Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (featuring The Ramones); and perhaps his best-known film, 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors.

Chances are, you’ve seen movie titles like these and thought, ‘I could come up…

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Sometimes when you hit upon a simple game design concept, you’ve just gotta run with it. The concept might be as easy as a deck of cards and a writing board; and when that game turns out to be loads of fun to play, well, that’s just icing on the cake. Join Andy as he reviews Blank Slate from The Op.

Blank Slate in 90 Seconds

In Blank Slate players compete to be the first to earn 25 points by “completing” words or phrases printed on a card drawn by the current player.

Setup is quick: pass out a miniature dry erase board and marker to each player, shuffle the deck of word/phrase cards, and write everyone’s names down on the dry erase scoreboard.

Draw a card, then pick your preferred side. The cards will all have a single word or part of a word, and an empty space. Sometimes the space is at the beginning, sometimes it’s at the end. Show all the other players the card, then get to work.

Your goal is to write something in the blank space that completes a full word or phrase. Scoring is almost as easy. Once everyone has revealed their…

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