Getting Smashed (Up) with Smash Up

What happens when you take every trope in gaming, from pirates and zombies to aliens and wizards, throw them together in a box, and declare all-out war? Unlikely alliances are forged and the fight gets brutal. In Smash-Up, from AEG, each faction has its own deck of twenty cards. Each player chooses two factions, shuffles them … Read more…

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Drinking on the Job

A game doesn’t always have to be sci-fi, fantasy, or some alternate reality to be fun. Sometimes a game can parody, ridicule or downright imitate some aspect of ordinary life and still be pretty awesome. Case in point: This week we played You’re Fired!, a part-deduction, part-hand management game that lampoons the world of corporate … Read more…

Tsailing in Tcircles on the Tseven Tseas

Tsuro has been, for some time, a perennial favorite filler game in our group. It’s fast, it’s light, and it’s fun. (And yeah, Japanese enthusiasts, we know the “t” is not completely silent; we’re being cheeky.) Then, just a few years ago, Calliope Games released a sequel, Tsuro of the Seas—a game every bit as pretty … Read more…

Dead, Alive, or Out on a Beer Run?

When Erwin Schrödinger is away, his cats come out to play… and they’re also physicists. That’s the idea behind Schrödinger’s Cats, a bluffing/deduction game from Ninth Level Games, creators of the popular RPG Kobolds Ate My Baby (“All hail King Torg!”), and the subject of this week’s Game & Beer Pairing. As cat physicists, players replicate … Read more…