An Average Gamer - Reviews in 500 Words

My Halloween edition is here and I'm talking about the wonderfully fun and challenging Horrified from Ravensburger.  This is a light but still challenging co-op game for 1 to 5 players and takes about an hour to play. I'd been hearing a lot about it from multiple sources and decided to pick it up a couple of days prior to Halloween. I tried out the 2-player starting scenario with Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon plus a couple of solo plays. First off, you should know that I do NOT look at How-to-Play videos before I try a a game. I need to know if the rulebook is clear enough for those who may or may not know about video play-throughs. This game was easy to learn and easy to teach. I read the rulebook once, referenced it when explaining the rules and had just 1 thing I had to look up mid-game. That's an A+ from me! But easy to learn and easy to teach does not necessarily mean fun to play. So, what do I think about gameplay? I loved it. It is challeng...

This little small box game falls right in the sweet spot for me so it was easy to decide to back it on Kickstarter. Shardhunters  by Lycan Studio  just arrived and I was able to pull it out and play a couple of quick hands of it. I don't know if any of the normal terms apply for describing it. It involves blind bidding during the Hunt phase to try and collect Monsters since the person with the most monsters at the end of a Hunt gets a "shard." Why do you want shards? Well, you use them to buy more Shard Hunters and the first person to win a Hunt with 5 Hunters is the winner. While I am not sure the theme makes sense if you think too long about it, the game play is definitely challenging. Trying to guess whether your opponents will bid low or high during a particular combat and then bid enough to beat them while also planning your strategy for the next 3 combats of the Hunt keeps things interesting. The Hunters add special rules to each Hunt which will make it easier t...

I backed this one probably for the same reason many others did... I wanted a game that felt like the cult classic Tremors movie (and series of Sci Fi channel spin-offs that were just plain goofy fun.) But I am going to talk about the retail version of Terror Below by Renegade Game Studios and not all the kickstarter add-ons and upgrades. The retail version runs about $45. The components for the game are excellent. Plastic worm eggs and rubble, wooden cars and a decent quality game board. The cards seem a bit thin and the dice are so-so, but overall, the quality rates well, especially for the price. In the game, each player takes on the role of a hunter/collector/survivor trying to find worm eggs and deliver them to specific locations, which gain you victory points. There are also bounties in play that you can get to increase your victory points. The first one to reach 20 points wins. Each character starts with a an item (in our first game we had a dog with a sharpened st...