In Dutch we have DROL, Dicht recht, open links. So close right, open left as a very strict translation. But DROL is also Dutch for turd.

Sadly it no longer is my field of work. Switched to IT when I couldnt find a job or phd in behavioural biology. Turned out I like IT quite a lot.

We have 1 more week of travel, visiting a rain forest at the east coast. Then back to Europe and to work.

Awesome! Thanks for the effort!

We dont mind that it eats the spiders here, they are huge and scary :p

We ended up at Madagascar because it was my long live dream. I studied biology and arranged a place for my thesis. However for my bachelor I heard I wasnt allowed to travel outside of Europe. And for my masters there wasn’t anyone educated highly enough to supervise me.

So when we were brainstorming for our honeymoon, my now wife came with this idea. It has been an amazing trip so far, but also quite intense. A lot of travelling in a 4x4, long days and early rises. The people here are quite poor, and that makes the travel a bit conflicted. But my biologist heart is really happy. We have seen amazing animals and visited wonderful places.

It is the Dutch railway company, so no, I wouldnt expect you to know this as a foreigner.

But I am a little sad now I am not part of the lucky ones…

We were on vacation for a while, so mostly played smaller games such as splitter, qwixx, agropolis.

Since we got back we started with Aeons end future and past, where we had a really cool play to win the game. Everything just came together perfectly. We also received our kickstarter for Borderlands, and played 1 game of it. Really enjoy the gameplay, they managed to capture the BL soul really well :D

Wait this has been out for a while now, hasn’t it? In the Netherlands we already could purchase it for 2 years now. Or am I missing something?

I hate it when the “and this is where we end the session for tonight” part happens 10 minutes in… once had a high level party teleport to the complete opposite side of the map 10 minutes after starting… That is when I learned what high level really meant.

I am not fully familiar with the term quarterbacking, but I assume it is where somebody effectively plays the whole game and tells everybody what to do?

I think if you are aware of it, it is easier to stop quarterbacking. When I play it I try to give advise on hotspots for problems, but I wont plan somebody elses turn. But they decide. But the game can be prone to it. You could always play with your cards closed, then people have less information, which prevents 1 person from figuring it all out, but might complicate the game some extra as well

We have had some busy weeks last weeks, so the amount of games is liwer compared to normal. This weekend we finally had some time again ^^

We played 2 games of good ol’ pandemic, which we horribly lost. Mostly due to the lab expansion, which we hadnt played in a while and forgot the proper strategy for.

We also played a game of Theotihuacan, but it isnt my game. We have played it a couple of times now, but I am tense the whole way through, as there are so many actions and every single one counts so much. If anyone has some experiences with this game and can tell me your experiences I would love to hear. It is a game my fiance loves, and I would like to at least like it as well…

Dixit is also a good fit! It is a very easily explained game, where you have to say a word or short phrase describing a mystery card. The rest then places a card they think that matches the description as well, and then a voting round starts. It is really fun, and playing it would do more justice than this explanation :p

Yeah it is one of those games that I wouldnt play without the expansion anymore. We really like the legendary dungeons, which adds quite some difficulty and allows for multi classes, which can create some cool and strong combos.

Sprawlopolis is very light weight and offers a lot of replayability.

We have laminated (I believe that is the english word) clever, qwixx, knaster and knister so that we can bring 1 set of dice and play those all.

We really like regicide, which is just 1 pack of cards.

Lastly you have some (card)games with a small footprint, such as The Crew, or Cahoots, or Pickomino.

Some that I havent heard but love are Pandemic and Spirit island.

And as a hidden gem: Heroes of Tenefyre and sprawlopolis. Heroes is a deckbuilder dungeon crawler where the new cards in your deck are the monsters you slay. Sprawlopolis is a city builder the size of a small wallet, which you can easily take with you. There are 3 challenges out if 18 which decide how the game will play, which asks for different tactics every time.

We had quite a busy week, so we only played two long Isofarian guard sessions and one Aeons End Legacy. Hopefully next week we will have some extra time

You might want to look at some laminated games with erasable pens. We really like Welcome To, and recently discovered Aquamarine as a 4 dollar game.

5 minute dungeon is a quicktime game that is coop, but was hard to get in Europe.

Picomino (regenwormen in Dutch) is a dice push your luck game that has a small footprint. I know you said no dice but still wanted to give the tip :p

Lastly you have walletgames such as Sprawlopolis (coop) which might be worth looking at, they are meant to be small.

• Light: cartographers/aquamarine
• Medium: Isle of cats
• Heavy: Spirit Island
• Most played: Gloomhaven, I think we have close to 150 games played.
• Favorite: I think this is a tie between Gloomhaven and Spirit island. I like campaign games a lot, but spirit island is such a wonderful game. SI always manages to give you that “how are we gonna do this” feeling, and then you stabalize (most of the times). Every game is tense.

We played a lot of the Isofarian guard last week, finished chapter 2 from the first campaign. They announced a couple of changes to the rules last week, and we really like them.

We also had our first introduction to Arnak at some friends. I like it, but I feel that you have to do too much, without becoming good at anything.

Lastly we finally git around continuing our alphabet challenge with Noria and Onirim :D

The crew! Both versions of it allow for replayability as you have different objectives every game. It is a trick taking game, so they might be a bit familiar with it due to other games like bridge. And it is cheap. Only thing that might take them a bit to get used to is that it is coop.

Another simple one would be take 6 (nimmt 6).