HeroQuest
1989 / Dungeon crawling board game / 2-5 players
****
Resold
Better late than never, and a crazily underpriced eBay listing meant I could finally experience the junior roll-n-hack proto-RPG, before deciding it wasn't really for us and selling it on to the next adventurer. I can't tell if it would have been a childhood favourite in an alternate timeline, but it didn't have a great deal to offer a 40 year old, nor a 6 year old pony RPG veteran, who got bored by the repetitive quests and preferred to use it as a weird doll house.
The Matchbox Collection: 15 Days expansions
These matchboxes are roomy enough for more cards and tokens, so fortunately Kickstarter backers helped to sort that out (before deciding they weren't interested after all and selling their unopened sets at a loss on eBay).
Feathers & Lag Season ***
Extended season sets win the game, so here are more extensions to fight over.
Upgrades the wooden animal actions to be more powerful. Possibly overpowered when playing against humans, this feels more like a fix for the difficult solo mode that means I can actually win now, unless I'm cheating.
The Matchbox Collection: 15 Days
***
I was sceptical about the quality matching the quantity when bidding on this set of five purpose-built microgames for the usual price of one (plus "expansions," that I'll get to), but if some Italians could be bothered to design, produce and market these, the least I can do is play them.
This first outing is a pleasantly dull set collection card game (Spoiler: They're all card games). Its wooden animal totems and pastel nature clipart are a welcome break from my usual dark and exciting themes, though the bastard solo automaton keeps it from being too relaxing.
2018 / Card game mini expansion / 2-4 players
**
I don't know whether this mini expansion really enhances the microgame or just makes it more annoying (especially when the card stocks from the same publisher don't even match), but introducing supernatural gnome and mutant entities makes it trippier. You might just be hallucinating in the mushroom fumes anyway.
The kind of weird game you only end up with when it's included in a cheap bundle with another one you actually wanted, I thought the quickfire deduction and bluffing would be too much of a step up from Love Letter for the six year old, but I asked if we could try it out once before I sold it on. Then she wanted to keep playing all night.
She might not have grasped every mathematical variable, but it's not like my efforts to track cards and probabilities fare much better. You just don't know what's in the pot, especially when a cheeky child sneaks in the man and other cards you're not supposed to. A surprise but welcome keeper, real stew was also more of a success than sushi.
7 Wonders Duel
Too hard and serious looking to have caught my eye if it hadn't been going unusually cheap that day, I made a few abandoned forays into the rulebook before I finally got around to playing it and quickly realised it was the Advanced Splendor I'd been craving. Every time I play, I'm impressed by how good a game it is, with so many things to keep track of even before I get around to adding in the bundled expansions. The only downside is I might have ruined most other games for myself now.
2025 / Board game expansion pack / 2-6 players
****
Releasing an expansion series for a 90-year-old board game is a funny idea in itself, and this one leaned into the silliness most, so seemed like it'd be a fun addition to her Sailor Moon set, but I didn't predict how much she'd be obsessed with it (for about a week, anyway). On the technical level, it creates more problems than it solves and essentially breaks the game. But when the game is Monopoly, you can't really complain, and it succeeds on the entertainment level. Especially when your promising overpowered card combo strategy gets you nothing but more worthless money, then your opponent picks up a card that lets her win by landing on Go.
2025 / Tile placement board game expansion / 2-6 players
***
"Ultimately, it's mostly pointless. I don't need or particularly want it in the collection" - Me, 2025
Well... yeah, but that was about the older version that included the rubbish bazaars. And the weirdly brown bridges that they've finally made grey to match the roads, so are more appealing to use now, even if I still forget to. It's nice to have proper castles rather than flimsy print-outs too, even if there's a little clash of art styles.
That was all I needed from this batch, so I sold on the next-generation tiles and surplus barns to further discount an unboxed set I'd paid for using eBay profits from recreationally upselling other people's underpriced Carcassonne sets, so it's not like I spent any real money on this completely unnecessary indulgence.
The Seafarers of Catan
1997 / Strategy board game expansion / 3-4 players
****
Resold
Whether I've got too dependent on expansions in other games or this one was especially lacking in vanilla, this wet widescreen extension was looking to be a compulsory purchase if I planned to hold onto the game this time – but only when I saw a cheap listing and made a stingy offer to discount it further.
It's not the expanded size and little tweaks that make it, it's the book of scenarios guiding players through varied experiences and setting you up to create your own unlimited variations (within tile limits, anyway). Unfortunately, there's no one else around who's boring enough to play it, and three-handed solo trading is too tedious even for me, so I passed it on to make game funds and space.
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| Freeing components trapped since the 90s. Play your games! |
2017 / Board game / 2-4 players
*
Resold
I thought I was clever finding these eBay auctions where sellers over-optimistically offer free shipping for unpopular games that end up costing them more to send me. There've been some success stories, but most of the time, when they do actually get around to sending them, it's usually junk like this, which I enthusiastically present to the child as "this was just cheap and might be rubbish, but do you want to try it anyway?" before we play about half a game. We've got loads of good games now, mediocre ones serve no purpose and it's better to have the £2.
**
Resold
Another budget cat-based game for the Christmas bundle (though not involving poo this time), I could tell as soon as we started laying out triangles and placing people because there wasn't much else to do that it wasn't going to be a hoot. There's an advanced version that I could have tried out myself, but I wasn't bored enough. She agreed it could be resold for funds towards something else.
1 Survives
2020 / Card game / 2-4 players
****
This one-deck slasher movie was a bit of a dodgy purchase with a young child in the house, but there are places to hide it, and it was at an irresistible price – maybe some of the best value entertainment I've ever bought. Best played with the full cast of six, whether that's with friends or directing them all solo (don't get too attached). It's just a shame I couldn't play this with my Edinburgh ghost gang around 2008, it was made for them.
Every real-ale modern board game wanker had their gateway game that lured them to the expensive world of analogue playtime. Mine was this cartoon-horror adaptation of Star Realms (which itself owes a lot to Dominion, and so on), which I first played on an app struggling through various solo challenges against an AI opponent (win while also collecting the whole Whateley family, or not having any green cards at the end, and so on). This mode sadly turned out to be absent from the strictly multiplayer cardboard version, so as befalls many gateway games, it now sits on the shelf, admired but untouched, as I found other games that were more fun to play against myself or with my child, or just had more expansions I could enjoy collecting.
But in this post-lockdown world, you can look up any game + "solo" and generally find some fiddly rules that someone's knocked together, so I tried some out.
R'lyeh Rising ***
Cthulhu plays any (or all) cards from the trade row based on dice rolls. There are also some instant-doom cards hidden low down in the decks, if you manage to get that far. I played a couple of times and lasted about six rounds. The insurmountable challenge is narratively sound, but playing against myself and actually getting to use some of the cards is more rewarding.
The Dark Lord Rises ****
More interactions with the trade row instead of dice make this feel more like the real game than the last variant, but it has the opposite problem of seeming too easy, unless I just got lucky. I might try it again.
Reskinning Star Realms' tricky Nemesis Beast boss card was so obvious that I didn't think of it, but the resulting imbalance seems to work in the player's favour. I hoarded purple cards and stayed ahead in the tedious tug of sanity until it was over. I don't enjoy the Star Realms bosses much either.
2008 / Card/board game / 3-6 players
****
It would've been simpler to start out with this basic game rather than coming to it after the spin-off and a semi-custom job, but I couldn't resist a second-hand set for the price. The scoring tokens are a bit fiddly, but more cards are always welcome, and there's all those bunnies.
This is still our favourite family game when both parents are around. When it's just dad and daughter, we switch to Muse, unless she's on a Monopoly kick.
2023 / Adventure gamebook / 1 player
**
The belated sequel to at least one of the endings of the surprisingly dark classic. We persevered, despite characters trying to persuade us to pack it in and go and play something else at various points. It's not difficult to work out where you are along the branching map on the back cover, but I let the six year old enjoy the often doomed journey.
2011 / Board game / 2-4 players
****
Swapped into Ticket to Ride's place just in time to be a more appealing "family" Christmas game (i.e. for Daddy), this comical panda/horticulture simulator looks quite delightful, but a cute theme and miniatures only hold the six year old's interest for a few rounds at present. I hope we'll have some good memories growing up with it anyway – especially once the expansion babies come along.
2020 / Stacking game / 2-6 players
***
I don't think we've had a stacking game since Bugs Building, but constructing this 8-bit/Minecraft fire to plan with tweezers (sometimes forced to use our less dominant hand) is considerably fiddlier.
A fun time filler, though even the low end of the suggested playing time seems optimistic.
2018 / Card game / 2-4 players
*
The daughter loves a bit of Uno, so seeing that there was a sequel for about dos pounds was a no-brainer birthday present. In that I didn't think to check out reviews like I normally do until I'd already bought it and learned how terrible it supposedly was. So it skipped her birthday to avoid disappointment and ended up being more safely cushioned in a Christmas budget games bundle with other tat.
We've played it uno times. Stripped of all the cards that make Uno fun (replaced with maths!!!), we had to play a few rounds of Uno afterwards to get rid of the taste. She won't let us get rid of it though.
***
A selection of choose-your-own-adventure stories enhanced with bits and bobs was an appealing idea, but in practice it feels more like overcomplication, and the tasks are very repetitive, so we might sell this on before bothering with them all. It's at least a step up from Usborne Puzzle Adventures.
2018 / Card game mini expansion / 2-12 players
**
A few extra options at an acceptable discount that made them just about worth getting. Mixed in from the start, we wouldn't know if we had one, but they're getting their use. They should have included more in the first place, but they're easy enough to make up and there's still plenty of space in the box if we want to add our own.
2017 / Card game / 2-12 players
****
Essentially Dixit or Stella for teams, though its cooperative two-player variant was more appealing for our needs. It doesn't spark imagination quite so much, but its restrictive instructions still encourage the six year old to think outside the box – like giving me the three-letter clue "agn" that baffled me until I finally realised it was an abbreviated "dragon." Nice one!
Already having surplus Dixit cards, this was easy to DIY at first by writing down the Inspiration cards and rolling dice to choose, but then we upgraded to the proper game at Christmas, whose purpose-built cards proved a greater challenge.
2013 / Card game / 2-5 players
****
Resold
Similar set collecting to Sea Salt & Paper, with the twist that hands get passed around, so you need to strategise your next turn in advance, or more likely curse yourself for giving your opponent what they're after while trying to make the best of your selection, forgetting that the same thing will happen again. The cute Squishmallow sushi made it a hit with the six year old (let her have all the puddings), who was eager to head to the shop to try sushi again straight away, and apologised to the game for finding it "disgusting."
2013 / Card game / 2-6 players
**
An inevitable product and gift, she tends to use these more as a Guess Who than the proper game. It was good to see that no more thought was put into the stats than with the My Little Pony set, with Frankie Stein's SAT score of 1 making them considerably dumber than the overachieving pets.
Monopoly: Sailor Moon
2024 / Trading board game / 2-6 players
***
This was a bit of a Christmas dilemma when searching for affordable Sailor Moon stuff, but I wanted us to upgrade from Monopoly Junior anyway (which barely even counts as a game) and the curiously specific theming around the exact season of the anime we just watched (the best one) and the pieces doubling as shiny souvenir tat ultimately triumphed over my distaste for completely irrelevant board game adaptations, especially ones that nonsensically use characters in place of properties. How do you mortgage Tuxedo Mask? What the hell is going on???
None of this bothered the young player, who wanted to play it every day of the school holidays after Christmas (and had to be talked out of multiple rounds for the sake of sanity). We use the house rule of everyone starting out with three random properties characters, keeping games within a tolerable range of 15–90 minutes depending on who shuffled.
Star Realms: Rise of Empire – Backer Promo Pack
2024 / Deckbuilding card game expansion pack / 2+ players
****
This is mainly variety for its own sake, but Hero cards are new to me, since I'd avoided having people in my spaceship game before, and it's nice to see more docking action and double faction bonuses. Along with the Frontiers Promos, I've now got enough nu-school cards to separate the two eras (pre- and post-Frontiers) to suit almost imperceptibly different moods.
The Settlers of Catan
1995 (1997 edition) / Strategy board game / 3-4 players
***
Resold
