Who is Good Owl Games?
Antoinette Mason is an accidental board game reviewer who loves dry euro games and long walks on the beach. She lives in Cork, Ireland working on Good Owl Games as a way to tell people about fantastic board games and to work on her own mental health. She's very proud of her unbroken win streak playing Time of Legends: Joan of Arc and doesn't play favourites among her games, they're all special!
While I like BTCities and I quite enjoy Castles of Mad King Ludwig, when I had a quick demo of Between Two Castles at Essen it felt like giving up the fun of BTCities and not replacing it with the fun of CoMKL. Still, opinions differ, and I may yet change my mind!
Sorry to hear you’ve been feeling rough, and I hope things come back together soon. As far as I’m concerned, I’d rather wait for videos until you feel like making them rather than have you thrashing something out when you don’t want to. I have an RSS feed reader – it’ll tell me when you post.
Ooh, I rather like Quantum – I think it’s been largely forgotten these days but I find it a nice semi-abstract space beat-em-up game. (If you find the dice feel slimy, you may have the originals where they used too much mould release compound – I’m told detergent works to clean them up.)
It’s been a very quiet gaming month for me after Essen. I picked up Renegade and its expansions, and I’m liking it a lot, though I haven’t got many plays in yet; and the Sensei’s Path expansion for Onitama. Of the Essen acquisitions, I’ve got in non-solo plays of Realm of Sand, and unexpected find Human Punishment (which isn’t as perfectly slick as some social deduction games, but is great fun and surprisingly atmospheric, and I’m raving about it to everyone I meet).
I’m about to stop buying games for a bit, because the 1 Player Guild is doing a Secret Santa for the get-together at the start of February, and I want to make things easy for whoever draws me. I have plenty of games to play over Christmas!
I discovered Tabletop Simulator on Steam, so I’ve been playing games on-line between my face-to-face sessions.
I don’t do social media but I might run into you on BGG.
It’s always good to keep an open mind and thanks for your support!
That’s great to hear good things about Quantum, very few people seem to be talking about it these days. I remember seeing a review for it ages ago and it never really left my mind!
Renegade makes a great solo game I believe, I’ve heard good things and I like how it looks. Onitama is the game I adore but never buy, it always seems slightly too pricey for me. What does the expansion add? Human Punishment I’ve heard of but know nothing about. Care to rave at me about it? 😀
How do you find Tabletop Simulator? I’ve seen lots of Kickstarter games use it to promote their products. Is it any good for playing games?
Social media is a silly place at the best of times. I do like BGG but I’ve no idea where to go or to post things on there, it needs a guidebook!
Wishing you all the best and enjoy your games 🙂
Onitama Sensei’s Path is more cards with different manoeuvres, so it’s a bit more variation but still basically the same game. Way of the Wind, which seems to be just out, adds couple more cards, but also a wind spirit which can be moved by either side; not sure yet whether I’ll go for that. I’m working on a design for a 3d-printable travel version because it seems like a great short game to play on a train or plane.
Human Punishment is what I think of as a “second generation” social deduction game – like the underappreciated Homeland it has three factions, each of which has some reason to ally temporarily with the others. In this case it’s set after the machine uprising, so you have Humans (kill all Machines and Outlaws), Machines (kill all Humans but don’t care about Outlaws), and Outlaws (kill everybody, even other Outlaws). Rather than having a close-your-eyes phase, loyalty is based on the total of two loyalty cards and one ID card per player, all of which start face down – so for example if I look at one of your loyalty cards (one of the standard actions) and it says “Machine ×2”, chances are you’re a Machine, but maybe your other cards outweigh it and make you a Human. Pretty soon everyone’s picking up weapons and pointing them at each other. And there are Program cards which can boost you, impair your opponents, or even change your loyalty. It’s a slightly complex game, not pared down to essentials like The Resistance, but it’s a great deal of fun.
Tabletop Simulator feels like a physics engine first, with some optimisations for boardgaming. You can roll a die by pressing the “roll” button while the mouse is over it, but you can also do it by picking it up and throwing it across the table. It takes a little getting used to, but particularly combined with the built-in voice chat it feels very much like having a physical game table in front of you, rather than like playing a computer conversion of the game.
I spend most of my time on BGG in the specific game forums. I know there are general discussion areas but I barely touch them…
More moves sound like a nice variation on the game, the wind spirit I wouldn’t be so sure about. A travel version sounds awesome, it definitely fits into that type of gameplay.
Human Punishment sounds like a cool version of all those social deduction game but to really have fun with it you’d need a pretty big group. I can’t believe it goes up to 17 players!
You’re so right about Tabletop Simulator. I’d thought it would be a way to play games but it felt so sparse and ‘functional’ that I returned it. Maybe I should have given it some more time? It just didn’t feel very user-friendly towards the uninitiated.
Someday I’ll master BGG, someday…