Remember when we were excited for the new year to begin, and we all could put the sinking sense of uncertainty behind us? It seems trivial to chat about games while our southern neighbours are being ripped apart at the seams. But we’ll do our best to offer a brief distraction.

Here’s what we’ve been playing over the past week…

BILLY C:

It was a big week for gaming in my house! After many hours of play, we finally beat mission #50 of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. It was cathartic and exciting, getting so far in and just trying to surpass that final milestone. I have also found time to play lots of other great titles in the past few days. Karuba, X-Wing, Sequence, Kanagawa, Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, and Sonora are all titles that I have played since the beginning of the year. Sonora was such a pleasant little surprise. I didn’t know much about it, but the way it blends dexterity mechanics and Roll N Write style into this beautiful Flick N Fill is clever and exceptionally well done. I could see myself playing a lot of it in the future.

DAVID W:

Introduced my mom to Ticket to Ride: London this week. She lived in London in the 60s so I thought she would get a kick out of revisiting old landmarks, and I was right. She’d never played a TtR game before, and it’s going to take a few plays to get her used to the “three choices, pick one” mechanic, but by the second game she was starting to find her feet. Mind you, when we finished the second game she demanded to play Timeline again! ?

STEVE T:

Good week for me. Most of the single play games were in person with my bubble at New Year’s Day brunch. I’ve logged well over 100 plays of Welcome to… since it dropped on BGA in December, and that trend isn’t slowing down. Played Ingenious with my bubble, and miracle of miracles: all 4 of us knew how to play! I didn’t need to teach anyone the rules! Wondrous!

MATTHEW R:

I got to play one of my favourite games, Space Base. A friend introduced me to an amazingly cool implementation of Space Base for Tabletop Simulator. If there is ever a deluxe version of Space Base I hope they take some ideas from it. I also had online game night with friends where we played a few different Jackbox games.

KIMBERLY T:

I played Godzilla: Tokyo Clash this past weekend and it was….interesting. I think it needs a second play and with the same players as the kaiju that you play are asymmetrical and each player needs to understand exactly what their kaiju does and doesn’t do to maximize their play/strategy. While it was fun to smash buildings for energy, the tough part (at least for me) was attacking my fellow players. I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding games with direct conflict and it was emotionally tough, particularly when it became obvious that the two kaiju my husband and I were playing were discovered to have more opportunity to score on when beat up on than another player (who was playing Mothra).

Stay safe, and keep playing games.