Unlike any game that we’ve played before, Tobago incorporates a location-deduction mechanic that requires each player to lay a series of cards in order to isolate where a given treasure is NOT. Now you may be asking yourself, “how is that useful?” Well… as my primary school math teacher would say while in between swigs of brandy from his flask (true story), “finding where something is not, allows you to deduce where something is!”

As much as I may disagreed with the fellows methods, his tutelage would better prepare me for hours of alcohol induced fun with this week’s game.

We had originally meant to release the Summoner Wars review before heading out of town for the holiday, but family and travel had a ruthless habit of intervening. Before all of the hustle and bustle, a portion of the 2D6 staff had a chance to get together and have a six person double, elimination tournament – which incorporated both of the currently available player sets. As usual, there was a fair amount of the swearing coming from Matt’s side of the room. Surprisingly, I think that Emily may have been the culprit.

Conflict of Heroes: Storms of Steel (CoH:SoS) is a very enthralling wargame that succeeds in ways that many wargames do not. Like most games of it’s kind, CoH:SoS does include a significant rulebook, which does involve a considerable learning curve. However, it strikes a very comfortable balance between providing a deep war gaming experience, while still remaining accessible and fun for a demographic that may not typically be into playing meatier war games.

Once the dice started rolling, we found ourselves engaged by the amount of intuitive complexity and ease of turn progression…

Just before evacuating town for our respective Thanksgiving holiday plans, we had a chance to sit down and play a few games of Race for the Galaxy. For a card game, we were fairly surprised by the amount of depth and strategy that the game incorporates. One side effect however, was that unlike some of the other card games found on the market, Race has a significant learning curve that, for some of us, was enough to discourage us from including it in our normal gaming rotation. That’s not to say that we felt that the game wasn’t fun or well designed, as that is by no means the case.

Having not played Pandemic in quite some time, we thought that we would give the cooperative gaming gem a bit of table time. It’s interesting how not playing a game for a while can cause you to forget that “hard mode” actually means what it infers – especially when inadvertently playing on hard mode. Thus was the case with our adventure with Pandemic. We rolled the game out anticipating a clean steam rolling session, and walked away with nothing short of blood, sweat, and tears.