The Handmade Fair - September 2016

I can't believe it's been a year since our last trip to The Handmade Fair! This year we weren't blessed with the same beautiful weather, rendering my obligatory bunting pics a little soggy...

Cardboard - 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis board game review

It's 1962, I'm pretending to be Russian and someone has left me in charge of the nuclear codes again. Ruh roh. Time for some strategic Cold War cube-shuffling in Cuban Missile Crisis game 13 Days!

Cardboard - Exciting games from Gen Con 2016

One day (when I'm a inexplicably vastly wealthy) maybe I'll make it to one of the awesome overseas conventions like Essen or Gen Con, but until then I'll have to attend vicariously through the Twitter feeds of others like a slightly geeky stalker and marvel at the shiny new games from afar.

This year's Gen Con in Indianapolis hasn't disappointed, with a huge crop of exciting new games to add to the wishlist. Here are a few of my favourites based on various hype, news and the odd pre-release playthrough:

Pokémon Go!

It feels like forever ago that I was excitedly writing about the announcement of Nintendo and Niantic Labs' collaboration on a new Pokémon-based artifical reality game. Last month it finally arrived, causing millions of people worldwide to abandon their sense of propriety, grab their phones and go outside to hunt down their favourite Pokémon in the wild.

Pikachu obtained. Game over!

Cardboard - Cortex Challenge card game review (with giveaway!)

Cortex Challenge is a family card game for 2 to 6 players designed by Nicolas Bourgoin and Johan Benvenuto. It's published by Asmodee and Captain Macaque who, as an aside, are now front runners in my mental competition for cutest publisher logo along with Happy Otter Games and Formal Ferret Games.

Cardboard - Knit Wit board game review

Matt Leacock is possibly best known for designing genre-defining team-work game Pandemic, but all co-operative thoughts go out of the window in his latest offering, social game Knit Wit.

Knit Wit is a word game for 2-8 players where they create Venn diagrams out of loops of coloured string, each of which has a word attached to it. Spools are placed at various overlaps in the diagram and players race against each other to think of a word or phrase for each spool, defined by the words looped around them.

UK Games Expo 2016 - Day 3

[Catch up with Friday or Saturday]

Sunday arrived, bringing with it one last day of gaming awesomeness at the UK Games Expo and the jarring realisation that all the games I'd carried up to my hotel room over the weekend would have to be carried back down again for packing into the car. After multiple trips through the hotel (including one where I almost caused Tom Vasel to miss a lift by wittering at him) it was time to head back to the NEC and see what we could cram into the final few hours.

Having looked forlornly at full Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu demo tables for the last two days, this was our first destination when the doors opened. Our hope was to try and sneak in a play of this latest horror-themed offering in the Pandemic series before the hall got too packed. Katie and I had apparently timed it perfectly and were lucky enough to get seats for a game - only to be beaten on the second turn. Not second round, second *turn*... I didn't even get a go!

Well, that escalated quickly...

This game can be mean! Luckily because it was still quiet we were allowed to start again and have a proper go - I've written a separate post on my first thoughts of the game here.