International Girlband #08 – January 2021

International Girlband’s monthly favorite games!

The International Girlband aims to promote Women into the boardgame community. For the occasion, every woman will present you their monthly favorite game, the one they most played, the one they loved to discover, in a word their own nugget !

Click on a woman’s portrait to discover her favorite game

Ludigurl

I have never been a huge fan of the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Because although I do respect his ability to describe the indescribable and how he manage to induce such palpable fear through words on paper alone, I have never really appreciated the horror genre, nor am I a huge bookworm. But that doesn’t mean I am unable to enjoy board games set in his terrifying world and that make use of the rather evocative Cthulhu Mythos.

One such game is Gates of Delirium, by Renegade Game Studios. In this game you are trying to discover the truth behind the rumors you heard, rumors about ancient runes, forgotten maps, and ancient monstrosities. The problem though, is that you and your opponents have started to lose grip of reality, and are all slowly but surely going insane.

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But the players are still, mad or not, trying to collect as many points as they can through the gathering of runes and map fragments, opening gates, and even feeding ill-fated investigates to the terrifying abominations that appear. And when the final monstrosity at last has entered through one of the gates the game ends and the player who succeeded in gathering the most points is declared the winner.

What I particularly enjoy in Gates of Delirium is the guessing and double-guessing of what type of round will be chosen. Because each round one player need to select if it should be a sane or an insane round, a choice that is rather difficult as you want it to benefit you but preferably not your opponents. Additionally the combination of set collection and area control is working splendidly as they create different kinds of tension. The production quality is also quite high and correlate well with the theme, although it is a stretch to call the game beautiful.

So, whether you are a Lovecraft fan or not, I still heartily recommend a journey down insanity lane, and don’t forget to bring your finest straitjacket…

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Marieke

My favorite game of the last few weeks is My City, a game by the amazing Reiner Knizia. The Dutch version just arrived this week!

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How to play?
My City is a legacy game in which you develop a city by placing tiles on the board. In this game there are 24 episodes and every game adds more rules and game elements. The rules are simple, but it’s actually really hard to make the most out of this game. Also, your choices in the game carry over into the next session.

Why is this my monthly favourite?
We fell in love with this game right away and we’ve played it every night since we got it! And the best thing is: you can keep playing it after the 24 episodes.

Discover Marieke’s Instagram account here

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Yvonne

Can you put these events into the right chronological order?

My favorite game of the month is the Anno Domini series designed by Urs Hostettler. This little game is perfect to play with non-gamers, especially when the whole family comes together. We played it a lot last holiday season.

How to play? Each Player starts with nine little cards with a historical event on each of them, the year it happend is printed on the backside. In turn, a player must choose a card and places it in the suspected chronological order between the other played cards. The player can also doubt the correctness of the order. In that case all the cards are turned over and the correct years are revealed. Depending on whether the order or the doubt was wrong, a player must draw additional cards and a new round begins.

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Why is this my monthly favorite? It is a simple game that you can start right away without a lot of rule study. Most of these events on the cards are so unique and weird, that mostly nobody at the table ever heard of them. Revealing the dates is always interesting and exciting. There are Anno Domini sets in all imaginable subjects: Nature, Lifestyle, Art, Women, Inventions and many, many more. And the best thing is, that you can mix all of them together to get more variety in the game.
Discover Yvonne’s Instagram account here
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Sofie

My favorite game of the month is the boardgame Minecraft: Builders & Biomes, a game for 2 – 4 players, which takes about 30 to 45 minutes, and indeed is based upon the digital hit Minecraft. How to play? In Minecraft: Builders & Biomes you gather resources in the form of cute looking cubes. Those cubes are needed to build structures on your personal player board, which will give you points for the largest connected forest, desert, mountain, or snowy tundra spaces. Each turn you take two actions, choosing from: move your character, collect two cubes, build a structure, collect a weapon and fight a monster. In total three scorings take place during the game, each time as soon as a level of cubes has been removed. Besides trying to build structures, you also want to gather weapons in order to defeat the monsters you encounter. Defeating a so-called ‘mob’ grants you extra end-of-game points, immediate points or a bonus action.

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Why is it my monthly favorite? I was very lucky to win this game recently and since my kids are an absolute fan of the digital version of Minecraft, I was really curious what the boardgame version would be like! I have to say the gameplay is very smooth. The idea of using those cute blocks to build your own small world is really nice. This building element combined with the fact of trying to defeat the monsters you encounter makes the game a lot of fun. I now finally understand why my kids loved the digital version that much 😉 So I’ll definitely bring this back to the table!Discover Sofie’s Instagram account here Back on top of the page

Anna

Paranormal Detectives is a crime/mystery themed party game from Lucky Duck Games. One of the players takes a role of a person whose life has ended prematurely. The role of the other players is to find out what the circumstances of this event were and who contributed to it. Interestingly, the only source of information from the title detectives are paranormal interactions with the spirit of the deceased. They have the tools appropriate to the situation at their disposal: tarot cards, ouija board, a spirit meter, pair of string, and some more direct forms of contact. Each Detective Character has a set of Interaction Cards. In one turn, the player uses one of them to contact the ghost. The card describes the means for the ghost to answer the detective’s question. After interacting, the player may try to guess the details of the event.

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Paranormal Detectives is a great game that you can play against each other or in a cooperative mode in which you try to solve the mystery together. You will have a lot of fun with a variety of ways to interact with the ghost player. It is a game based on various forms of communication without the use of words, which requires a lot of creativity from the ghost player. The players receiving the message, depending on the ghost’s skill, will also have to come up with what the ghost meant. Communicating some of the details can be difficult, especially when the detective chooses a tool that is unsuitable for it or asks a question that will not help the spirit with the task. The stories that players are going to try to figure out are interesting and not always easy to guess. They bring to mind crime mysteries from books or TV productions. All we know at the beginning is the state of the deceased’s body – we need to get the rest of the information from his spirit. We had a lot of fun, even playing just the two of us — it all depends on the company of course, but we think most, especially those who like mystery mysteries, would like Paranormal Detectives and it’d be a source of fun. Discover Anna’s Instagram account here Back on top of the page