by Ambie Valdés

First Orchard is a cooperative game where you’re trying to get all the fruit of four different colors into the basket before the crow reaches the end of the path. Each turn you roll a die and put that color fruit into the basket. If the basket is rolled you get to choose the color, and if a crow is rolled you move the crow. It’s good for learning colors and simple strategy with the choosing of the colors.

by Ambie Valdés

As some of you may know, I am a mother of 17 month old twin boys (at the time of writing this). My husband and I had a decent collection of children’s games from before our babies were born, but the only game we had for toddlers was Go Away Monster!, which is labeled ages 3+ on the box. We'd played it with our friend’s daughter when she was a little under 2, but we wanted to get more games for toddlers. We found out that there are very few games for children under 3 years (probably due to babies putting everything in their mouths). But during a sale when my babies were ~14 months, we bought a bunch of games from HABA’s My Very First Games line, which are all for ages 2+. Over the past few months I've slowly been introducing the games to them, and I wanted to share how we've been playing them and how my twins enjoy them!

The games we bought are First Orchard, Here, Fishy, Fishy!, Building Site, Tidy Up!, and Hungry As A Bear. We also received Teddy’s Colors and Shapes as a gift. Due to the many cardboard pieces and more difficult gameplay, I haven’t had my babies play with Building Site and Hungry As A Bear yet, but the others they have “played” and love!

In each game review, I’ll go over how I play the game with my twins, which components I keep in the box, and a ”Chew Test“ for the components.

by Ambie Valdés

A while ago I wrote a review of an escape room type game called Unfinished Case of Holmes. Now the publisher iDventure has created another series of immersive games called Detective Stories, where you’re like a detective using a bunch of evidence given in the game as well as online sources to solve a crime. The first in the series is Detective Stories: Case 1 - The Fire in Adlerstein.

by Ambie Valdés

It’s not really a secret that I’m into economic games and 18xx games. When I read the rules to City of the Big Shoulders, an economic game with stock holding, worker placement, and factory production, it sounded a lot like a mix between Arkwright and 18xx to me. Since I love both of those, I was excited to try out City of the Big Shoulders.

If you haven’t realized by now, I’ve been playing and reviewing a bunch of puzzle games recently, because I really enjoy these types of experiences. The latest one I’ve played through is The Tale of Ord, a puzzle adventure by PostCurious where you’re finding clues and puzzles through the packages in the game as well as through online resources.

The Enigma Emporium is a new puzzle game company with a concept similar to Dispatch by Breakout, which I’ve discussed on the podcast before. Each Enigma is a story with puzzles that you’ll use the components they send you plus your knowledge and online materials in order to solve. But instead of being a subscription service with an unknown cost, The Enigma Emporium has an up-front cost for each product, and Wish You Were Here is only $12 for the entire package! This can be done because the components are just five postcards, but there are still a ton of puzzles packed into it.

by Ambie Valdés

If you don’t know, I’m a huge fan of Escape Rooms and Escape Room type games. As of writing this, I’ve played six Exit: The Game games, six Unlock games (all the ones released before 2018), the four cases from the base game of Escape Room: The Game, and almost 20 actual Escape Rooms (and probably some other things that I’m forgetting). So… I like those types of games.

Unfinished Case of Holmes is another Escape Room type game with puzzles centered around you trying to resolve an unsolved murder from over 100 years ago. It uses an app along with the printed game materials, and the timed mode gives you two hours to complete the case.

by Ambie Valdés

Last weekend I went to my second MeepleCon, a board game convention in Las Vegas! The convention was three days, but we ended up getting a flight early Sunday morning to go home (other flights were a lot more expensive), so we were only there on Friday and Saturday. But we still had tons of fun playing games!

I played 22 plays of 15 different games at the convention (plus some Craps), 8 of which were new to me. The most played and my favorite new game was The Mind, a new cooperative card game where you have to play the cards in order without talking! Jess had a copy that she borrowed from Scott Alden and was bringing it around to everyone at the convention to try out. It was really hard and a lot of fun, and I really want to get it. Unfortunately, it's currently only available in Germany, but I heard that it will be coming over soon.

by Ambie Valdés

We hosted our second annual Blitz Con this year over President’s Day weekend again. Last year we had 50 people, but this year we grew to a little over 100 people! We had a much bigger space and there was always plenty of room to play games.

by Ambie Valdés

I hadn’t heard much about Cursed Court before getting a review copy of it, but I read the rules and it seemed interesting enough. Cursed Court is a bidding, betting, and bluffing game, with both hidden and public information. Think Poker without the gambling real money part, and with more theme. It plays 2-6 players in about 30 minutes.