March 2025 review

I currently have the fantastic opportunity of being part of a gaming group and can play board games multiple times each week, in addition to my own solo adventures. Not every game or session has incredible stories to tell, but I think there is value in sharing a few thoughts on the many games I've played last month. Well, technically last month plus the last two weeks of February since I started this blog mid-month.

Carnival Zombies, 2nd edition

Fun swarm defense game. Not sure about the overall difficulty scaling, maybe easy could be even more forgiving. The game favors several playthroughs as you can fail forward.

White Castle

A dice drafting game where resources are very tight. Your overall experience will depend on the randomness of dice rolls and available actions based on card draws. Not very complex, probably an entry point for euro-light games, definitely recommend the expansion for expert players. I had fun, but I can see players being annoyed by the randomness factor.

Heroscape, the old edition

This game has come back in the news as Renegade Studios is selling a new edition. I'm not a big fan of skirmish games, Heroscape is not something I would play regularly. This being said, I think it's well-made. Good-looking map, simple rules even at the Master difficulty level. Probably not balanced at all, some characters should be yanked off to space as one-shot abilities are not cool, but it is things I expect from these games.

Lords of Vegas, 2024 edition

Building casinos in Vegas based on dice rolls and card draws feels very thematic. It has the downside that if luck isn't on your side, you might have a bad experience. It's not all luck based, you have a one or two decisions each turn to build a light strategy. I would put this in the Fun-for-Family category and believe it serves this audience very well. After playing a 4-players game, it had me wonder if with fewer players, the reduced amount of interaction would make the game less fun.

1793: Patriots & Traitors

Unfortunately, this game left our group thoroughly unimpressed. The French Revolution theme is strong, but the gameplay design left us with more questions than anything. Too often, we had to check booklets to understand what exactly a card would do. Several cards felt too circumstantial to be useful, causing disappointing draws. It's an issue when your entire turn could be drawing a card. They can be used to place influence on the board, but why put 1 influence when it can be bumped off easily by your opponent? Still, we are curious to see if the game feels more balanced in 4-5 players setting, or even in the solo variant.

Rollplayer Adventures

It's a simple game mechanically, but the puzzles offered by skill checks and combat are interesting. Especially when the person reading the rules does it correctly. 😆 My friend read them too quickly and thought 1 stamina equal your choice of colored dice. Nope, nope! It's 1 stamina per player! Funnily enough, that was like his 7th game.

Freedom Five

We had so much doing the first mission, a slow albeit well-designed extended tutorial, that we decided we needed to play a full scenario as soon as possible. I really like the idea of dividing each scenario into smaller chapters, it makes the game more dynamic.

Daybreak

Another game we had so much fun that we have scheduled a second session! It's a coop game with not that many player interactions. However, the game is really hard, you will need to strategize together to save the planet.

In the last month, we also progressed in our Oathsworn (2nd Ed.) campaign, we're now up to the 17th chapter. Our group is getting a bit tired of the game, we're planning to play more often to finish the campaign before the Summer vacations. I played three scenarios of a Scarlet Keys campaign (Arkham) with two-friends, more on this later this week as I will share my deck.

What did you play this month? Leave a comment below!