Viticulture Game Review: A perfectly balanced game of rustic progression

Best Moment

I thought I had the easy vic. I had an early, steady flow of grape planting and harvesting, I had great visitors helping increase wine production with some nicely aging wines to fulfill orders. My wife was slowly progressing along without too much success. She then deftly tacked to a heavy tour-based approach with her valuable tasting room, and it worked! She pulled off a very close victory proving that there are many paths to success!

ChessKid.com: Top 10 Things I Love

If someone were to ask me, “Do you want your children to learn foresight, consequences of decisions, resilience, how to handle pressure, determination, and strategic planning?” I would emphatically respond in the affirmative and ask how. If they responded with, “Teach them how to play chess,” I’d be taken aback. However, chess does teach those skills, and there is no better medium I have found to learn the game than ChessKid.com.

Antiquity Quest Game Review – An intense, up-and-down adventure for the ages

Best Moment (for the other players!)

Treasure cards are rare. Creating a perfect treasure collection is even more rare. I had a four-card, perfect treasure set ready to complete for a good portion of the end of the game. I finally made the decision right at the end to duplicate a card resulting in half the points for that collection. Guess what I drew the next turn! The blasted gold coin pile I needed that entire time. Too late! To make matters worse, those points would have jumped me from 2nd to 1st place. Ugh…

Tower of Madness Game Review: An exciting, dark game of strategy and chance

Best Moment

Two Doom marbles had already dropped. We knew the third was close to falling. No one had gone mad yet…until my nephew dropped his last madness marble, immediately went insane, followed by the third Doom marble hitting the ground. He simultaneously went crazy and won the game in the same round!

Photosynthesis Board Game Review: Box out other trees to become king of the forest!

Intro

A seed is planted, a young tree sprouts, its roots start to crawl deeper into the earth, its branches begin to reach toward the sky…then it gets crowded out by surrounding bigger trees and dies. =-( Your job is to be those bigger trees by hungrily soaking up the lion’s share of sunlight at the expense of other trees around you!

The Room Video Game Review: An engaging and eerie virtual escape room experience…perfect for a date night!

Intro

My wife and I have a monthly at-home date night. This helps us stay connected to each other while disconnecting from the world. While some at-home date nights get interrupted by the kids (grrrrrr…), this one went off without a hitch!

Let me set the scene for you: all blinds and curtains closed; all lights off; couch scooted up close to the tv; long HDMI cable connecting our PC to the tv; and a tv tray set up in front of the couch with a wireless mouse and mousepad. That’s it. Then we started The Room. An eerie music started, and the mysterious storyline unfolded before us…

Euphoria Board Game Review: Uprising. Influence. Courage.

Intro

Euphoria is one of those games that consumes your mind for hours and even days after playing it the first few times. Every gap in conversation my wife and I had those first several days was filled with, “Man! Next time I need to hit up Icarus more…” or “Ugh, if only I had finished the Subterran Tunnel earlier…” This constant analysis roils in the back of your head, and it’s awesome!

Istanbul Letters and Seals Board Game Review: A fantastic expansion to an already great strategy game

Intro

Wow! Letters and Seals is a terrific expansion to Istanbul. It falls in that perfect zone of replayability where it doesn’t diminish from the replay value of the original (as compared to some expansions which are so much better they virtually take over the original game) and other expansions that are only so-so (where you only play the expansion because you invested the money to buy it). It adds some really fun dynamics to an already very solid game. Here are the added components and my thoughts on each: