Microreview by Basejester I-P

* **Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King** (7.5) A simple and interesting tile laying game with auctions. Plays fast. Variable win conditions. Having a lot of fun with this. * **Jaws** (7) Hidden movement. Hits the movie theme. Good fun/hour. * **Just One** (7.5) Cooperative reverse categories. A good party game. Scales well. * **Kemet** (4.8) Miniatures are cool. Power tiles are cool. Action selection is cool. But then you do king-making. I find that boring and unpleasant. Also, the map is stupid and feels not at all like a physical place. * **Khan of Khans** (5) - Simple push your luck card game. * **Kingdomino** (6) Draft tiles with a land type. Arrange the land types. Do multiplication. It's OK but kind of mechanical. * **Le Havre** (7.2) Turn resources into other resources that are worth more points. Build new places where other players can turn resources into other resources and take a cut. Very Euroy Euro. * **Machi Koro** (4) Roll dice. Get points. Catan without the game. * **Mansions of Madness: Second Edition** (4) Oh boy. A Cthuhlu Mythos miniatures thing. This is a video game with a bunch of fiddly physical components that serve no purpose. If I'm going to play with an app, I sure as hell don't want to to type in the results of a die roll. Occasionally, we pause the spooky dungeon crawler to do a thematically unrelated puzzle game on the app. Lots of people really like this game. This is not the kind of experience I want from a board game. * **Monopoly** (4) Better than We didn't Playtest this at all. * **Monsters Menace America** (4) - Great theme. Send your monster to destroy cities and gain useful mutations. Send your inadequate military to slightly inconvenience your opponents. But the end is extremely anticlimactic. Even if I tell you, "Hey, the end is really anticlimactic," when the game ends, you will say, "Wait, that's it?!" * **Munchkin** (3.9) Look, it's fine for what it is: a stupid parody game with clever little jokes and matching art. It's fine. But it's too long for what it is and not very interesting from a gameplay perspective. No, I don't ever want to play it again. Also better than We Didn't Playtest This at All. * **Mush! Mush!: Snow Tails 2** (7) A sled racing games with simple mechanics and amazeballs table presence. * **Mysterium** (7) A cooperative where one player (the ghost) communicates to the other players the circumstances of his, err, multiple deaths through cards with weird and ambiguous art. Overtaken by other similar games. I think 4 is the ideal player count. It can be played with lots of folks, but it puts a lot of pressure on the ghost to play quickly in that case. * **New York Slice** (6) I cut you choose with a neat pizza theme. It's OK. * **Now Boarding** (6.9) A real-time cooperative pick up and delivery game. I dig the cartoon art. * **Obsession** (8.3) A hand management and tableau builder about running a Victorian England household with servants. This can be a fun theme to embrace, even if you (like myself) find these people ridiculous. It's a good puzzle, with a market for new rooms (in which to hold your events) and competitive goals to provide interactivity. Clearly a labor of love. * **Outfoxed!** (7.3) - A good deduction game for kids about identifying a fox that stole a pie. A few things annoy me about the design 1) output randomness that would be better as input randomness. 2) And clues should definitely be placed face-up, so that the players can actively seek the clues that help them solve the crime. The small person I play this with enjoys this one a lot, along with the usual dexterity games. She's able to find a role-playing angle that's pretty entertaining for me. * **Palabra** (5) - Scrabble with cards. * **Pandemic** (7.5) I know, quarterbacking. This is a good game. * **Paris** (7.2) Area majority. Resource management. Point salad. I've played this a few times, and I still have very little idea how to approach this game. You have to actively do things to generate scoring criteria. This one is worth a look if you like, say, Rococo or Concordia. * **Paris: La Cité de la Lumière** (7.1) Conflicty polyomino game. Nice production. * **PARKS** (7.8) Collect some resources. Turn them in to score a park. You can't move hikers backwards. You can't (with some exceptions) occupy a space with another hiker. Fantastic art. Fantastic insert. Fairly simple rules (with a few rough edges, IMHO). Good gameplay. * **Patchwork** (6) Seminal drafting polyomino game. These are really my significant opponent's thing, and she enjoyed this one but now prefers other games in this category. * **Piepmatz** (6) Bird card game. Arithmetic and planning.