Cardboard - Marvel Legendary: Captain America 75th Anniversary card game review

Continuing my little series on Upper Deck's Legendary deck builder, this week it's the turn of Legendary: Captain America 75th Anniversary. Again, I won't go into details on the basic gameplay, as that's covered in my original review of the base game which you can catch up on here.

If you didn't get enough Captain America in Marvel Legendary: Civil War, here he is again dusting off the shiny vibranium shield for his very own small box expansion to celebrate reaching the grand old age of 75. That's a lot of candles...

There's a lot packed into this little box (including a bit of time travel, which can never be bad), so let's have a look through what you get in your 100 cards:

Cardboard - Marvel Legendary: Civil War card game review

So Marvel Legendary was great fun, but that box was looking a little empty with just the base set inside. Not that there wasn't plenty of choice in the starter box, but with shelf space at a premium it would be a crime to have that much spare air in the box for too long, wouldn't it?

Luckily enough, Upper Deck offer plenty of expansion options to switch up your game (or make best use of your storage space!) and I'm going to take a look at a couple: Civil War and Captain America 75th Anniversary. I won't go over the basic gameplay again, as they're all in my review of the base game which you can catch up on here.

Join me as I hang my head in nerd-shame at how little of the Marvel universe I really know. First up, Civil War:

A Guild Ball newb goes to SteamCon - November 2016

This weekend I headed up to Leeds with my Guild-Ball-obsessed husband to visit SteamCon, the three-day-long celebration of all things Steamforged Games. As well as tabletop fantasy football game Guild Ball, Steamforged are also famous for their hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for Dark Souls: The Board Game, due to ship in April 2017.

As I'm not very experienced at Guild Ball, this post might come off a bit like one of those news features where the BBC send a straight-laced, well spoken man in a suit to check out Minecraft or a new hipster cafe. Nevertheless, there's plenty to talk about even with my limited knowledge!

Cardboard - Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game card game review

Since Dominion took the boardgaming world by storm in 2008 all manner of deck-building games have been released. There's seemingly one for any theme you could think of, from novel writing to sci-fi or anime maids to mythological gods, and I feel like I've played a fairly sizeable chunk of them.

Teetering on the edge of deck-builder-burnout, what appealed to me most about Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game is that it's co-operative. Your elite team of Marvel super-hero types will fight a dastardly Evil Mastermind together, fending off a parade of villains and henchmen and generally foiling evil schemes to clinch a win. More accurately it's a *semi* co-operative game; whilst you may achieve victory over the bad guys as a group, you still get judged on your personal performance to pick an individual winner. Because there's no 'I' in 'team', guys... but there is a 'me' and I was clearly just more heroic.

Cardboard - Creature College board game review

If you've ever felt a burning desire to fight an eight-foot high hamster named Kevin using a rag-tag band of elemental creature creations (and let's face it, who hasn't?) then I may have found the game for you!

Making - October 2016

I can't believe that the last time I made a 'making stuff' post was in January! There have been a couple of craft-based posts since (like another trip to the Handmade Fair last month) but this side of things has definitely been neglected. Inexcusable! (Although, if anyone has any suggestions for how to magic more time into my life to get things done, they'd be gratefully received...)

As far as what I *did* get done goes, the past few months have been very much cross-stitch focused while I tried to clear out my work-in-progress pile. This post is a little update about where everything is up to.

I'm still working on the Pumpkin Passport stitch-along pattern from The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. There are only two months to go until it's complete and I'm excited to see what countries we'll be headed to for November and December (maybe Canada and America might feature somewhere?)

Here's the pattern complete up to October (with Australia and a very cute koala):

Cardboard - Ice Cool board game review

With the summer sun abandoning us in favour of wintery chilliness, pumpkin-spiced lattes back on the menu and the festive season fast approaching (or at least that's what the shops keep telling me), it seems only appropriate that I'm taking a look at Brain Games' sub zero penguin-powered dexterity game Ice Cool. Because nothing says 'festive' like accidentally firing plastic penguins at your friends!