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My 2025 gaming has been off to a great start. My only first-world complaint is that I never have enough time to play everything that I'm excited about. I have lots of goodies queued up to hit the table, but and quite a few that have been standing out.
BOARD GAMES
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The Witcher: Old World
I've been loving The Witcher: Old World lately. It's such a fun, thematic adventure game with deck-building and really cool card combo opportunities for combat. Unlike many games of this style, it's competitive, not co-operative. You play as a unique witcher racing to be the first to gain 4 trophies to win the game. You gain trophies from defeating monsters, meditating after fully leveling up skills, and also from defeating opponent witchers. During the game, you play cards to move around the beautiful map, engaging in a variety of encounters, fighting monsters, leveling up your skills, and gambling. Oh yeah, I said "gambling". You can play dice poker in the game to hopefully gain some sweet gold. I love the look and feel of the game board, and the graphic design of the cards. It has been blast playing this with Matt (who was already a Witcher fan from the Netflix series and video game). I ended up picking up a "few" expansions already too. Can't wait to play it more!
BGG Link
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My Favourite Things
I've heard nothing but great things about this trick-taking party game has been around since 2015, but it's only recently available in the US, so I picked up a copy. I've only played a single (5-player) game so far, but it's pretty cool and unique. You have your own set of cards which are ranked 1-5, and there's a broken heart rank as well. These cards are in sleeves so that you can reveal or hide the ranking. Each round, you write a category (i.e. TV Shows, 80s Music, Places to Travel to Relax) on your category card – all of the cards are dry-erase – then you pass your category card and your other cards to the player to your left who has to write their favorite things for that category, and something they dislike on the broken-heart card. After you pass the cards back to their owner, such that they can only see your responses, and not the rank, you play a round of trick-taking with those cards, trying to play the lowest rank card into the trick. It's pretty wild because, you want to pick a category that you will hopefully know how the person would rank their responses, so you have some control during the trick-taking phase. But then it gets extra wild when you're trying to decide when to play which card. It's fascinating and fun! ...a neat way to get to know your friends/family better.
BGG Link
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TOP TRACKS
Well hello, Lamb!
When searching for music, I often look up an artist I love (i.e. Björk) and check out related artists in hopes to discover more music to love. That's how I stumbled upon Lamb a few days ago. I suspected I'd like this duo when I read this brief description of their sound: "unconventional arrangements informed by jazz, drum'n'bass, classical, and other genres". It's too soon to say which album of theirs that I like best, but I'm really enjoying exploring their discography.
I'm super excited to play Black Rose Wars: Rebirth, as well as some older games I picked up last month at the Strategicon Virtual Flea Market (Hyperborea). Plus I'm stoked to playtest the solo mode Ricky Royal cooked up for my game!
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