Jake, the nickname-less portion of Pops & Bejou Games reached out recently promoting their soon to launch Kickstarter for their first game CULTivate. A quick look at the box art had me hooked enough to dive a bit deeper. I spent some time going over the rules and watching their How to Play video and found what seems a promising light puzzler with a pile of charm. I look forward to following along with the Kickstarter and giving the game a try when I can.
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Ruthless is a perfect example of a modern card game. A game that has suits and poker hands but, because of its theme and setting, the rules make sense to me. It’s a card game that uses poker-style hands as a mechanic but bids adieu to the Royal suits of traditional playing cards. Replacing them instead with amazingly illustrated pirates. The standard four suits we’ve come to know are supplanted with swashbuckling swords, skull and crossbones, and bleeding hearts.
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When an article appeared on Steve’s computer screen one day announcing that Nunami was the first Inuit- designed board game and that it had a positive environmental message, he immediately wanted to know more. Steve reached out to the designer of the game, Thomassie Mangiok and he was kind enough to answer some questions about himself and his game.
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Ruthless is a perfect example of a modern card game. A game that has suits and poker hands but, because of its theme and setting, the rules make sense to me. It’s a card game that uses poker-style hands as a mechanic but bids adieu to the Royal suits of traditional playing cards. Replacing them instead with amazingly illustrated pirates. The standard four suits we’ve come to know are supplanted with swashbuckling swords, skull and crossbones, and bleeding hearts.
This week we celebrate the triple-threat designer, artist and publisher, Ryan Lauket of Red Raven games. Ryan is responsible for hit games like Near and Far and Above and Below. He has a fascinating story of how he started in the board game industry as an artist, then a designer. We dig into all of that goodness and go on to gush over our favourite Red Raven games. While we’ve only played a small sampling of his games, the art, mechanics, narrative and world-building at play has left us craving more.
#YESRAVENSBURGER One of the things I love about the board game hobby is the community. How so many of the publishers and people that make the hobby tick are just regular people. Small family run business working from their homes, with a few obvious exceptions. Recently I had an interaction with Ravensburger, one of the biggest and oldest publishers in the hobby that showed me that even the exceptions care about the community.
Jake, the nickname-less portion of Pops & Bejou Games reached out recently promoting their soon to launch Kickstarter for their first game CULTivate. A quick look at the box art had me hooked enough to dive a bit deeper. I spent some time going over the rules and watching their How to Play video and found what seems a promising light puzzler with a pile of charm. I look forward to following along with the Kickstarter and giving the game a try when I can.
So, I am definitely a little late to the table with this "review" as Flashlights & Fireflies was originally published in 2015 and is currently out of print (yet still available in places). Designed by Jeff Johnston the game was originally published by Gamewright Games. I started considering it for our daughter in 2016. She was four at the time. We didn’t actually get a copy of the game until 2019 and so I was worried we had probably missed the window for it since our daughter was now 7. I was wrong though.
