A blog about good beer and great games!
Eric Cesare 
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…
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…
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…
This week, we played a train game! And no, it wasn’t Ticket to Ride. Yardmaster Express by Crash Games is a micro-game that takes only minutes to play. It’s fast, it’s small, it’s simple—and most importantly, it’s thematic and fun. While we play our fair share of micro-games, we don’t often use them in Game … Read more…
Good game design balances choice—not only in the number of options a player might have, but especially in how meaningful those choices are to the outcome of a game. Some of the best games—at least in our opinion—are the ones in which choice matters enough to make us think twice before we roll the dice, … Read more…
This week, the veteran gamer of our group, Tom, invited us over to play Police Precinct by Common Man Games. So naturally we grabbed a cop-themed beer and headed over to make an impromptu Game & Beer Pairing of it. In Police Precinct, players are cops trying to solve a murder before the killer can escape. But … Read more…
Lately we’ve been playing a lot of games that rely fairly heavily on luck, so we’ve been craving something with a bit more strategy in our Game & Beer Pairings, something in which players have more control over the outcome. You know, like chess… except not chess. Bullfrogs by Thunderworks Games fits that bill perfectly. … Read more…
They say, “Don’t judge a game by its cover,” but we couldn’t help ourselves—as soon as we saw the box art for Three Cheers for Master, we knew we had to put it in a Game & Beer Pairing. There’s just something terribly appealing about the silhouette art style, the random blood spatters, and the vicious … Read more…
We’re still kind of reeling from our session of Dungeon Fighter. It was simultaneously one of the most raucous, humorous, and frustrating games we’ve ever played. But holy fun, Batman! For this week’s Game & Beer Pairing, we partnered Victory’s Mad King’s Weiss with a game that one of our group members, Mike, brought over for us … Read more…
…And we don’t mean calamari. No, we’re referring to the tentacles of some ancient, terrible thing—because they always have tentacles, don’t they? So it should come as little surprise that this week’s Game & Beer Pairing features a recent release aptly called Ancient Terrible Things. In this game, players assume the roles of brazen characters riding … Read more…