Month: December 2024

Trekking The National Parks

Designed by people who have been to all our National Parks, Trekking The National Parks features a comprehensive map, fun facts and pictures, and plenty of replay value! With many different ways to score points, it’s anyone’s game.

Cards are used both for movement and to claim Parks, depending on whether you’re using the number or the color/symbol; Parks have the matching symbols next to their point value. The more cards they take, the more points you get! To claim a Park, you have to be on that space on the board, and play the right cards – and this is a separate action from movement, which is terribly important! Because you only get two actions per turn, and sometimes your buddies will Sorry-style bump you back to Start. Our own games got progressively more competitive and Munchkin-esque the more that we played.

Beyond claiming Parks (which I’ll admit may have involved some favoritism, especially towards ones that I’ve already been to), you can also score points by camping at Major Parks, picking up stones, and having the most stones of a given color. Stones are laid out randomly at the beginning of the game, and picked up the first time someone visits a Park; Major Parks are selected, three of the six for each game, and have an effect when or after you camp there. Yellowstone, for instance, lets you draw a card off the top of the deck when you claim something. This is especially useful because drawing takes up actions, one per card, and is the main factor slowing down your tourism. Camping is done the same way claiming is, except Major Parks accepts multiple campers!

As a nature and travel nerd, this game is a delight. Most of the National Parks have cards, giving you incidental exposure to Cool Things The World Has To Offer, and the parks that aren’t on the cards are in a little booklet to the side. You can tell that the creators truly love the subject material, and that they were careful to weight the mechanics so you can revisit it again and again.

(Note: my understanding is that the “claim” mechanic is called “explore” in the third edition, and that it adds rules for solo play. What I played was the second edition, so that’s what the post’s about! Very excited by the possibility of playing as the bear, though, which is usually the First Player token.)

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Free Books!

Hard sell, right? I’ve recently been availing myself of Freebooksy’s daily deals, featuring free e-books from many an author. Though they mostly target Kindle users, other platforms do make an appearance; books are also organized by genre, making it easy to skip to the sections that you like. I’ve been especially delighted by the variety of cookbooks! Regardless of your taste, there’s likely something that matches them – if not today, then tomorrow. As long as you’re willing to peruse the list, of course.

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Kittenish Mischief… Now With Magic!

Wizard Kittens asks and answers the question, “What would cats get up to if they had magic?” Which is, of course, making a big ol’ mess and then trying not to get caught. Players are student cats, who have accidentally unleashed a whole host of Curses and have to defeat them before their teacher finds out.

This is an excellent game for Young Gamers! The mechanics come in tiers, so you can introduce whatever degree of complicated is right for your players, and there are no hidden cards. Each kitten has a standard set of actions – Summon, Sling, Swat, and Switch – with the Advanced version replacing one of those with a character power. Progress looks like collecting the right ingredients in your Ritual Circle’s chapters to defeat the corresponding Curses, with a chance that the other players may get to them first. Victory looks like defeating all the Curses, and scoring the most points between those and Extra Credit.

…Usually.

See, getting caught isn’t an idle threat. In the deck, on one of the last eleven cards, is Professor Whispurr, and if the Professor is drawn then the game ends prematurely. At this point, you do not want to have the most points – you want to have the least, so you can plead innocent of being involved! Luckily, Extra Credit only applies if you didn’t get caught, and managed to seem passably responsible; these cards usually award points for cards left in your Circle once the Curses are done. Also available is the Magical Monsters expansion, which doesn’t change too much and does add Monsters. They function a bit like Curses, but with effects pre-defeat!

This game’s adorable, and I love the variety of “pick your poison” in difficulties, character powers, New Rules, etc., as well as the duality of the end conditions. Most especially, however, I love the expansion’s new kitty’s name: Van Meowsing.

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The Intricate Dance of Photosynthesis

Tragically, I have not decided to write about the biological process by which carbon dioxide becomes oxygen and water becomes sugar. Rather, I’m here to talk about Photosynthesis the game – a forest-building strategy system with rotating advantages. I’m of the opinion that introducing this to chess players specifically would be highly entertaining – like chess, it’s all strategy, and unlike chess, there’s trees!

The basic principle of Photosynthesis is this: you’re trying to score points by facilitating a complete life cycle for your trees, and to do that, they need sunlight. The sun rotates around the board, however, so which trees shadow each other changes from turn to turn!

Light Points are earned by trees left in sunlight, more points the taller they are, and spent to grow, plant, and purchase. The latter was the mechanic that took the most adjusting to, at least for me. Not so much buying the trees before using them, as a limited pool of next-size-up certainly focused our options a bit, but that when you replace those – when a large replaces a medium, and the medium goes back in the pool – it goes back to the to-purchase section, rather than what’s available for use. I wasn’t particularly fond of this choice, but to each their own.

Something I did like about the mechanics, however, was the incentivization of competition. Players start around the edges of the board, you see, and for the most part we kept to our own, out where we could keep from blocking our own light. However! Trees are worth more the closer to the center they are. And since cashing in large trees is the only way to score points – other than a leftover Light Points exchange, which is not favorable – it got us spreading out.

Each player represents a different type of tree, which the seeds show. As a botany nerd, this of course made me very happy. My favorite part of this game, though, is the art on the backs of the player boards. Isn’t it pretty?!

Four artfully rendered forests opening into grasslands, a soft fade to the colors that makes it feel surreal. All but the yellow forest have birds overhead; red also has a squirrel and a fox, while blue has a bear and green has a rabbit and perching bird. On yellow's, and somehow I missed it the first time, a deer peers out between trunks. Blue is visibly a pine forest, while the others are varying types of deciduous.
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Staying Grounded In The Face of Magic

If you’re a fan of the fantasy genre and enjoy comedic trope deconstruction, I highly recommend The Dad Who Lived’s “If I Was the Dad in a YA Fantasy” series! It’s an expanding canon of its own, told in a series of TikToks, and calling on elements of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Twilight to implicitly ask The Big Question: Where are the responsible adults? And how different would the story be if there were some?

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