Category Blog

Fantastic Beasts: Perilous Pursuit

Game Review:

One of the games that is in our most played stack is Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (you can see our review HERE).
So, naturally, when we saw a new Co-op game from USAOpoly (now called The OP) set in the Harry Potter universe, we were already halfway to the checkout.

Fantastic Beasts:Perilous Pursuit is a Co-op game for 2 to 4 players based loosely on the Fantastic Beasts movie (which we quite liked).
It’s a dice-based game where each player takes on the role of one of the four heroes from the movie – Newt, Jacob, Tina, or Queenie – to try to capture beasts into Newt’s suitcase before they escape or kill the heroes.

Sound interesting?  Then read on to learn more.

Setup: Each player takes one of the character boards and the associated cardboa...

Jaipur

Game Review:

When we aren’t making music, most of our board gaming time is spent with just the two of us.  In addition, as we’ve been to conventions and other gatherings, we’ve heard over and over “well, if we play games, it’s just two of us – so how does it play two player.”  This tells us we are not alone in wanting good two player games.

We are always on the lookout for great two player games!

Enter Jaipur – a two player trading game.  Eh?  What?  How do you have a trading game with only two players?

Gameplay:

In Jaipur, players are attempting collect and turn in sets of particular goods, such as Silver, Gold, Cloth, etc…   The larger the set that is turned in, the more points.

The game is comprised of a deck of cards, which has six kinds of goods cards – Ruby, ...

One Deck Dungeon

Game Review:

There are plenty of Co-op games that play well as a two player experience, but Co-op games that are specifically built to be one or two player only are not currently very common. So when a two player “rogue-like” co-op game showed up on Kickstarter, we were intrigued. (Note: You can play this game with up to four players, if you have two copies of the game. More on that later.)

To make it even more compelling, it billed itself as a dice based dungeon crawl that can be played in about 30 minutes. It uses one deck of custom cards, a whole bunch of colored dice (DICE!!!), and a few wooden bits to track things… and it packs a lot of fun into that small set of parts!

Gameplay:

To start, each player takes a character card from one of the five classes...

Updated 7/21/19 – see Travel section at the bottom.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Game Review:

It is safe to say, we are big Harry Potter fans! But there have been quite a few Harry Potter themed games that have been nothing more than a slight re-theme of other games (Harry Potter Uno anyone?) or trivia games. These are fine for what they are.

Then Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle came along. When we were initially looking at the game, it went a bit like this:

Harry Potter game… not a re-theme – We’re interested.
Fully Co-op – Ok, Sign us up!
Deck Builder – Shut up and take my money!
With a sort of Legacy like progression – We can’t shove money at you any faster!

Gameplay:

In Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, each player takes the role of either Harry, Hermoine, Ron, or Neville (Team Neville FT...