I was on vacation with my partner last week and we packed the card game version of Café International

The board game version is from 1989 and I was extremely nostalgic about the game, as it was one that I used to play a lot when I visited my grandparents back when I was a young kid.

After playing two round of it we realized: This is and OLD game, and it shows. Even the card game version from 2001 shows it’s age in both the ridiculous artwork as well as the game mechanics like drawing/discarding cards for minutes without any change to the board state.

We chose to leave it in the hotel lobby. Maybe it will bring joy to someone there, it brought no joy to us other than a short flash of nostalgia, so we decided we’ll never play it again.

Finally I had the time to play the new games we got at the Spiel

Arborea - 3 this week, 4 games in total. Played with 2 and 4 players. I am so glad I backed it. The mechanics of the game are pretty unique in my collection. Putting workers in but not immediately activating them and hoping they will be pushed further until it is your turn again is exciting and interesting player interaction. The shared resources I like most. I like the idea to produce and if you can’t or don’t want to use them the player is rewarded with points. The owls seem very powerful, hard to get but work nicely if you have your gift set-up up and running. I haven’t tested the rule cards yet, but they could add a little twist to the game. The midnight expansion is cool, need to use the fish more next time.

Satori - from a score board of over 300 we come to max. 40 points. It is cute, shared workers with few possibilities and each time you do a combo you feel like a pro. I like that you can annoy your opponents with evil moves. With 2 players the board is a little bit restricted. Would like to test with more players.

Eleven - well. I am not into sports, the flavour seems nice. The game play is meh, in my opinion. The matches are too fiddly in my opinion. An overlay for the cards with markers to show if a goal was scored would be nice.

Witcher the old world retail edition - I do like the card combo effect. The little links to do combo attacks. The flavour text is loosely webbed into the game. The text reads nicely (German edition). Player dice poker against the other players is like real gambling and as far as I know there is no way to cheat (yet). The end came a bit sudden (2 players). Would like to test with more players.

Drums of war - what a downer. I either don’t understand the game or it really is a lame game. Didn’t like it. Art work is okish.

Bite - cute quick game with high value double sided paper tokens. Easy to learn. Hard to master. A good small game.

We did Cthulhu DMD, zoo Vadis, and voidfall. Zoo Vadis was not for me, the game basically forces you to negotiate and people never want to help me out. Voidfall continues to be fucking amazing!

It was a week of lighter games for us this week.

We started with 2 plays of Tsuro with 6 players, each of which resulted in 3 players winning! We were surprised how avoidant of conflict most of us were in this.

Secondly, we then played a game of Roll for It! to see the night out. I’ve never played this, but really felt like it needed some rerolls as in Yahtzee or Poker Dice. I spent far too many rounds rolling 1 die waiting for my number to come up only to have to wait for 5 other players to do their thing!

When we have the time it’s Funkenschlag (Power Grid)
Otherwise it was mostly Bang! or Scout