174 – PAX Unplugged, Day Three – The Family Gamers Podcast
Episode 174? That means we’ve been doing this podcast for 3.5 years! This will be our final PAX Unplugged podcast episode for 2019.
What We’ve Been Playing
Monza – “everything we wish Candyland could be”. Up to 6 players, color-matching, and racing. Roll dice and see how many you can use to make a path, by matching the colors on the dice to the path in front of you.
Dungeon Academy – A roll-and-write, but not like any you’ve ever seen.
Isle of Monsters – watch for a SNAP review at the end of this week.
Megacity Oceania – Anitra has been excited for this since seeing it at Origins. Build skyscrapers with plastic pieces (representing concrete, steel, glass) on hexagonal tiles. Slide completed buildings into the city. You can keep working on your building(s) even when it’s not your turn!
Action Cats – a sort of Apples-to-Apples style game where you make up stories about cats (with real pictures of cats).
Machi Koro (with the Harbor expansion)
Sagrada
Sushi Roll – we are really liking how this mixes up the Sushi Go! format.
Similo – a big hit with the kids!
Adventure Games: The Dungeon – Anitra “ran” this adventure for the kids. Chapter 1 ran a little long, but they enjoyed it enough that they want to find out what happens next. (Review coming soon.)
What Did We Get for Christmas?
Not a lot, boardgame-related. “A bag of baggies” and Dice Forge: Rebellion (the expansion to Dice Forge).
PAX Unplugged Interviews
(13:50) Genius Games with Justin
Ecosystem – a card-drafting game in which you build a food web / ecosystem. Your ecosystem is a 4×5 grid, and every card has its own scoring mechanism – however, you’ll lose points if you don’t have enough diversity in your ecosystem!
(17:50) Luma Imports with Colin
Welkin – market manipulation game. Create blueprints for fantastical buildings, changing the values of resources used to build the buildings along the way.
Treasures of Cibola – you’re trying to get artifacts out of the collapsing temple. But you don’t know how they’ll be valued until the game is over, since boulders will get dropped on the point board as you’re leaving! A quick family-friendly game.
Similo – (which we’ve raved about over the last several podcasts.)
Team 3 and Snowman Dice in partnership with Brain Games.
(25:50) Elf Creek Games
Honey Buzz – an economic game with bees! Unfortunately, bees are not good economists, and they’re flooding the market with honey.
“It’s truly a bear market… because they’re selling to the bears.”
(30:45) Pack-O-Games / Perplext with Chris Handy
Roland Wright – a dice game about creating a game! Roland is trying to match patterns of dots, representing his inspirations for parts of the game he’s creating.
You roll dice, mark colors down on your player board, but then you can also erase previously-written dots to take other actions.
Pack-O-Games: These are incredibly small; every game uses 30 cards that are 1×3″. (All have 3-letter names: we reviewed BOO.)
(37:20) Move38 with Jon
Jon is the designer of Blinks – “the world’s first smart tabletop game system”. Each of the hexagonal game pieces is intelligent. Each piece works like a video game cartridge that knows a single game – but can “teach” the other pieces and play together. Many of the games operate in real-time, and can be easily customized by how many pieces you use.
(45:00) Van Ryder Games with Shaun
Van Ryder makes graphic novel choose-your-own-adventure puzzle books. We’ve enjoyed their Sherlock Holmes series,
Crusoe Crew – this is a set of 4 books, where each book represents a different character. A group can read the books together, take separate paths briefly, then regroup.
Bees! – a family game in partnership with Awaken Realms. Play your cards to get pollen stones (everyone gets something), then use the pollen stones to buy honeycomb cards to get points.
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