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!
Happy new year!
I don’t like ranking games in order either, so I did a similar set of categories on my blog: “abstract game”, “puzzly game”, etc., up to “huge licenced game that turned out surprisingly good” and “race game that’s really a card game”
Memoir ’44 is still on my “try playing this some day” list.
I don’t really mind if you don’t introduce a game – if you make it sound interesting, I can always look it up, since I have this Internet thingy. But it does put more of a burden on you to make it sound interesting. 🙂
I very much agree with you on rulebooks – and in particular designers should rarely be the writers, because they already know how the game is meant to work and what all the assumptions are. Same for playtesters and so on. I think the best person to write the rules is a technical writer who has just learned the game. (Speaking as an occasional technical writer I have to admit bias here.)
Happy New Year to you too! I enjoyed your list, I feel the same way about Onitama 😀 V – Commandos is one my husband would love to get but is worried we might find it too easy. Is it a challenge to win at it? Or just fun to get to the end? Can highly recommend Memoir, love it!
Yeah, the joy of working with no script and on a whim meant I didn’t realise most of my errors till midway through. I almost didn’t post it but decided someone might find it entertaining.
Completely agree with you on rulebooks. I’ve received a number of prototypes for Kickstarter previews and it’s so apparent when someone has never used the text to teach the game. It’s something I’d love to get into myself someday.
Best of luck with getting to your unplayed pile!
V-Commandos is quite variable in difficulty – some missions are easy with a bit of thought, some are very hard. Most of them have increased-difficulty options that are specific to that mission, rather than just giving you more enemy soldiers to avoid. If you fancy giving it a try at a slow pace, I’m about to start a play-by-forum teaching game on my own boards (https://discussion.tekeli.li/) and you’d (both) be welcome to join.
I’m glad to hear that the difficulty is so varied, it gives me hope! Thank you for your kind invitation, I’ll have a look into it