With parts of Canada currently suffering their worst waves of the pandemic, our entire writing team is feeling the burnout. As such, we’ve made the decision to roll back What Have We Been Playing from a weekly article to a monthly release. 

Below are our most memorable gaming experiences from April 2021!

BILLY C:

The past few weeks for me have been delightfully filled with games. Not only did my Kickstarter copy of Railroad Ink Challenge show up, I also fully played through a Clank! Legacy campaign. Clank! is a game that gets me excited normally, but wow did the legacy elements really turn it into a beautiful experience.

And having two fully customized Clank boards at the end of the experience makes me excited to play some post-campaign games too!

And the Railroad Ink Kickstarter copy is stunning. The new game modes are a delight, the expansions look wonderful, and it has reignited my delight at that little roll & write

NICOLE H:

I’ve gotten to play some one-off D&D this month, which has been such a treat. One game was a terrific one-shot that consisted of the group of characters (picked from pre-gen character sheets, nice and easy) who had been found guilty of a crime (whether we were or not that’s another matter!) and got sent out into the world to retrieve someone being held prisoner in a gnoll encampment. Long story short we did rescue him and in the process one of our players not only exploded the camp’s latrine corner but ended up wild magic-ing fireball on himself right after. Oops! [Pic in the thread below is the group of us receiving the assignment from “The Judge”.]

The other game is one that friend of the DWP Stella (https://www.twitch.tv/saintstella) has run for me and a couple of our friends who’d never tried D&D before. We’re a motley band of a Dragonborn ranger, Half-orc rogue and a Goliath Druid who got stuck inside a weird magical bog-land and we’re really trying to figure out just how to get the heck home! Stella is so great at taking new players through the character creation process and leading them through an adventure. Highly recommend watching some of her RPG streams on Twitch!

DAVID W:

Got my KS copy of Bullet♥ from Level99 last week and it’s lived up to its promise of puzzly fun. Solo mode is decent but I think PVP mode will be better when I can play it that way…eventually…I will also say I am impressed with how they (successfully, imho) threaded the needle of anime-style graphics that were inclusive as well as not sexualized.

STEVE T:

April continued my trend of many games a day on BGA, with a lot of that being Railroad ink in the last week of the month. I was also able to play some new to me games in the face to face with my bubble. Unmatched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Point Salad, and the Isle of Cats being the most recent additions to my collection. I really like the Unmatched system, but I’m undecided on Isle of Cats. The drafting mechanism doesn’t seem to add anything to the game aside from complexity and time. Point Salad is a nice light card game that doesn’t do a lot for me, but I can see its appeal. I also managed to get some dexterity games in with some plays of Menara, Tokyo Highway, and Loonacy.

JON-PAUL D:

My eldest daughter and I played a fair bit of MATCH 5 together in April (which we covered in this week’s Tuneful Tuesday review on the Little Big Thumbs Instagram account), which is a word and party game driven by dice. Each round involves rolling five dice, which corresponds to a variety of category prompts. Players have 3 minutes to write down connections between each pairing of two dice, for a total of ten possible responses, and then everyone compares answers. If all players agree that a link makes good sense, that player receives 1 point, and if multiple players write the same answer, they each receive 2 points. In playing with my daughter, we have set aside the timer and use the game as more of a creative exercise, writing down links at our own pace and sharing responses along the way. Seeing how her growing brain connects different categories is a pure delight, and it’s also a great educational tool to practice writing. I’d recommend this game for both fast-paced party play with adults, as well as a fun tool for adults and children to enjoy together!

MATTHEW R:

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons for the past couple of years, but this month was the first time I took on the role of Dungeon Master, which is essentially the storyteller who runs the game. It was a bit intimidating to take on that role, but it was something I wanted to try. I was not ready to build a full world/campaign so I found a free one-shot on Dungeon Masters Guild called Moon Over Greymoor, which billed itself as a good adventure for both new players and new DMs.

I recruited some friends to play, one of whom was very new to DnD, one of whom is the DM for my weekly campaign, so I wanted to make sure it was both newbie friendly and yet still interesting to a seasoned vet.

I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos from The Dungeon Dudes, a Toronto pair of DnD experts whose videos were of great assistance in preparing for me to take on the DM role. They have a Discord chat and I got some good advice from people in there that helped me tweak the one-shot.

Well things went off really well and all of the players seemed really happy with how things worked out. So much so that what was intended as a one-off game, is going to be expanded into further adventures.

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Thank you for joining us for this monthly rundown of what we have been playing!