My New Game Review Feature on Boing Boing

I am going to start doing periodic game round-ups/reviews on Boing Boing. Here is an excerpt from my first piece:

Stuffed Fables
Plaid Hat Games, $60, 2-4 players, Ages 7+

Stuffed Fables, by Mice and Mystics designer, Jerry Hawthorne, is a cooperative story-telling miniatures game that literally takes place inside of an illustrated storybook. I love the backstory here. The game is played within ten adventures that take place in a little girl’s bedroom (with each adventure triggered by a milestone event in her life, like moving into a big girl bed). As she sleeps at night, her nightmares come to life and crawl out from under her bed.

To defend her from these boogeymen, her beloved stuffed animals (“stuffies”) come to life and go to battle against these monsters from her nightmares. The little girl remains none-the-wiser about the epic battles that take place as she slumbers. While the game has a fairy-horror theme, and awesome miniatures to fit that theme, it’s not very dark to play. It’s rated 7+, and that probably holds true in practice, although the rules and game mechanics might prove a little too fussy for younger attention spans. The plastic miniatures (23 of them), the storybook/gameboards, and all of the rest of the components are gorgeous and very much fit the dreamy/fairy-horror theme. I’m planning on doing a Stuffed Fables game night at my house soon and requiring players to come in PJs and bring their own stuffies. Molly, optional.

OGRE Miniatures Set 1
SJ Games, $30.53, 2 players, Ages 14+

OGRE has a soft spot in my geeky little hexagonal heart because it was the first map and counters wargame I ever bought. This was the ancient “pocket edition” from the late 70s which sold for $2.95. OGRE-love is stronger than ever these days, with a multitude of ways of playing the game (look for a feature on current OGRE madness soon). The latest offering from Steve Jackson Games is a wonderful set of plastic OGRE miniatures.

The set includes 40 6mm plastic miniatures, including two OGRE cybertanks (1 Mk III, 1 Mk V). This set is sold as a box of miniatures for use with 6th edition OGRE, but the box also includes the OGRE Lite rules, a lovely pearlescent d6 OGRE die, and two erasable record sheets for your OGREs. With all of this, you basically have everything you need to play (minus an irradiated post-apocalyptic battlefield to further irradiate).

Read the rest of the piece here and stay tuned for new game round-ups about every month or so.