First board game of 2025! And what better game than the new Cthulhu: Death May Die – Fear of the Unknown. We had a fairly new player in the group (the hosts brother), and, well there’s a bit of setup involved in DMD. So we had to keep reassuring the guy, saying “it’s really straightforward to play”. Which is more of less true. Anyway, we got into it, episode 1. We had to gather jurors into a particular space, and flip their sides over. And everytime the Elder One advanced, the jurors would get flipped back. We really got bogged down with cultists and monsters, the Elder One was out and we hadn’t disrupted the ritual, so that was bad (can’t do any damage to the Elder One). I think we ended up with half of the jurors in the right place. I bought these cool plastic tray from Etsy to use as a player board, making it harder to accidentally nudge your various tokens. But of course I forgot to bring them (even tho they were right next to the three boxes of DMD). A bit annoyed about that. I would have put them into a box, but there’s really no space for extras, those boxes are chockas. And one of our players was not happy that she couldn’t play her favourite colour, purple. But we played through the pain and had a good time.
Just One, good fun. Since we had an extra player, I brought this along. Ok, it’s still more fun with more players, but it was still an enjoyable experience, and it takes almost no time to learn.
Don’t L.L.A.M.A Dice, another very quick game to learn. I think the rules overexplain it, I was a bit lost from the rules explanation last week. But it’s actually pretty simple – roll three dice, match as many cards as you can. If you can’t match anything, take an extra card from the display. And if you can’t do that, you take ALL the extra cards. Good fun, excellent little filler.
The Emperors New Tricks, first play. This was a pnp I printed up. You’re trying to win the least tricks. On your turn you play two cards, one for the value and another for the colour. So, if I play a one and then overlay a red card, it’s a red one. You still have follow suit if you can. And playing the same value and colour cancels out both cards. So you play the highest card you can and there’s a good chance it will get cancelled. Possibly allowing someone else to win who didn’t expect to. When you win a trick, you take all the colour cards. White cards are worth a point, red and blue cards give you the difference between them (so if you had four blue and two red, you score two). And green cards are worth three points for whoever has the second most green cards. Pretty fun game, definitely going to play it some more.
Warning: semi nude image
Dungeons, Dice and Danger. I have to be honest, I don’t enjoy this game much. And I’m just terrible at it. it’s a straightforward enough game – roll dice, use pairs of dice to cross off spaces on the player sheet. You will defeat monsters and collect treasure and gems. And you lose a life if you can’t cross anything off. Which seemed to happen a lot to me. I’m still happy enough to play it when others want to, I’m sure they play plenty of games to keep me happy.
