Book Review - The Devil's Storybooks

I'm not sure when or how this book landed on my bookshelf but I found it there recently and decided to give it a read. I'm glad I did. The Devil's Storybooks is a collection of twenty short stories. It sounds like this was originally published as two separate books but the edition I have includes the stories from both books in one collection. 

Written for children, each of the stories are rather short with most being fewer than 10 pages and some quite a bit shorter than that. The language is simple and evocative and would be great for reading aloud to smaller children. My edition also includes illustrations with each story that makes for a lot of fun.

Board Game Review - Broken and Beautiful

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer. Something that might otherwise be discarded becomes something unique, valuable and beautiful. The game Broken and Beautiful uses the art of Kintsugi as the theme. 

The game is played over multiple rounds. Players take turns selecting cards to create sets of bowls, plates, cups, jars and other pottery and servingware. Players can either add the card to their collection or sell it (discard it) for gold to be used later. After each player has selected two cards through a "snake draft" process there will be two remaining face up cards. Those cards determine what will be broken. Any player with a matching type of pottery must "break" their pieces by rotating the card sideways. 

Broken dishes and pottery are worth zero points. Thus, players may use the gold they received when discarding other cards to repair their broken items. Broken items regain their original scoring potential while also gaining additional scoring benefits, making them more precious.

The small deck and simple rules result in a quick play time while still showing some depth of strategy that may have some tricky decisions. Depending on what cards are available, it can be tough deciding whether to take a card and use it to score or cash it in for gold in case one of your other high-scoring cards gets broken.

Book Review - The Midnight Library

Trigger Warning: Suicide & Depression

Life is hard. Life is messy. That is at the heart of the narrative in The Midnight Library. Nora is a woman in her thirties feeling intensely dissatisfied with her life. She not only feels that she has failed to achieve her own goals and potential but worries that she has ruined the lives of others. After the events of one particularly awful day, she decides to kill herself.

The afterlife she finds herself in isn't anything she would have expected. Rather, she enters a library with what appears to be endless rows of books. She quickly meets Mrs. Elm who acts as a sort of spirit guide and caretaker of the library. Mrs. Elm is in the form of Nora's childhood librarian who was a kind of solace during hard times in her youth.

Mrs. Elm explains that each one of the books represents an alternate version of Nora's life. It is a life in which different decisions were made that created different outcomes. Nora now has the unique opportunity to select a book and take her place in that life to see if it is the life she would like to return to. If the book/life she selects doesn't meet Nora's desires she will return to the library and select another book again and again until she finds her perfect life.

Board Game Review - Good Cop, Bad Cop (third edition)

Good Cop, Bad Cop is a great team based social deduction game. In each game, players are randomly dealt 3 facedown cards which will determine whether the player is a (as you may have guessed from the title) a Good Cop or a Bad Cop. Each turn, a player may Investigate another player (by looking at one of their 3 facedown cards), pick up some equipment or even a gun, or Shoot a gun they picked up earlier.

The goal is to eliminate the leader of your opposing team. At the onset of the game, you don't know who is on your team so you need to rely on social manipulation and table talk to try and form alliances and determine who you can trust and who may be scheming to take you down. Some of the equipment you pick up can help expose team members, but if you accidentally reveal the leader of your own team then the opposing team will be able to quickly target and eliminate that player.

If you've played games like Mafia or Werewolf, you will find familiar elements here. I like the interesting twists added by the equipment cards that can give you a special advantage or even cause a little chaos by manipulating the identity cards (which could result in a person becoming a member of a different team).

Even though it has player elimination, each game goes fairly quickly so there won't be a lot of downtime for players eliminated early on. There are even some equipment cards that can 'revive' a previously eliminated player to get them back in the game.

Board Game Review - Viscounts of the West Kingdom

I recently had a fun time learning Viscounts of the West Kingdom from Garphill Games and Renegade Game Studios. This is the third in the "West Kingdom" series and yet another amazing game from Shem Phillips.     

As with the other West Kingdom games, players strive to earn the most victory points by hiring various workers and using their resources to advance their goals. Similar to the first two games, you must work to build a deck of workers that will best help ensure you have the right resources and influence to carry out the tasks at the right time.    

Available actions are determined by moving your Viscount figure around a Rondel that outlines a specific path around the board. The amount you can move depends on which worker you play on your turn (though you can adjust this slightly by paying coins or building a certain building). When your Viscount ends movement, you are presented with a handful of different actions.