Arctic Scavengers to Dinner In Paris

This is the first in a series of three catch up posts intended to remind myself about what I thought of the new-to-me games I played between the start of 2025 and mid-March. This post stretches in alphabetical order between the two geographic locations of the Arctic and Paris, there’s otherwise no link between the games other than when I happened to come across them and play them.

Arctic Scavengers

I remember Shut Up and Sit Down being impressed with this game, but that was a long time ago now. It’s a deck building game very like Dominion but it took us a little while to figure out the rules and get the hang of the differences. Also took us a while to sort out the cards from the mess they were in in the box and the rulebook was terrible so it wasn’t a good start to the game. It was ok. Having played a lot of online Dominion, where it notably plays a lot faster than in person, it felt too long and slow, possibly because we were all new to it and didn’t move the game on enough. Would probably be better on a second play.

Bonfire

I really liked this. You are collecting different sorts of tokens that let you take different actions to move different things around to score points in different ways. Having been warned that it was the sort of game where you try to do everything and fail at it, of course I tried to do everything and failed at it! I’m surprised I didn’t take a photo because the board was very pretty. There are many different things going on but they fit together pretty easily and the game wasn’t hard to understand. Just hard to do well at.

I think this might have been my favourite of the games in this post, it is definitely one I would jump at the chance to play again before passing judgment on.

Chronicle

An entirely forgettable trick taking card game which I have already forgotten and am happy about that.

Cities

I expected to like this, and I did. A pretty simple game where you draft tiles, buildings and scoring cards to build up a city. I played it two player and think I would have preferred it at three or four where you’d have more choice of what to take. At two player it felt a bit too much like you just had to have what was there. I’d say it was a good slightly more complicated alternative to Kingdomino. City building is my kind of theme and this seemed to have a lot of variety as you could play with objectives based on different real life cities.

CoLab

This was a gorgeous game! Plus I really enjoyed playing it. You’re building up a tableau of cards on your own player board to score points. But it order to get the cards you’re rolling dice and sending them out onto a central board to get other stuff for yourself whilst trying not to leave the board in a state where your opponents can exploit that too. The nice player mats we had were somewhat of a hindrance as the 4x4 grid of cards could be built up in any direction so sometimes we needed to shift them all. The board that grows outwards with tall towers was nice but a bit of a table hog. I found synergy in the cards which is always nice. There were a lot of cultural references in the cards, most of which went over my head, but look at HP Lov’kins here, don’t let him near your potions! Definitely a game I’d be happy to play a second time.

Cosmoctopus

This had a fab mechanic. There’s a plastic octopus on the board who you move around on your turn - in the photo my friend has moved the octopus to his player area as he’s won the game by collecting eight tentacles. The rule is that when you’re finished with your turn you turn the octopus to face the next player. This saves me from eternally asking if it’s my turn, I just look at the octopus. And in fact you just end up asking the player the octopus is facing if they are done and when they say “yes”, you tell them they aren’t, and they sigh and move the octopus to face the next player. It was an improvement on something you pass around the table in turn order and forget about but could get annoying, we found it fun and silly and enjoyed it.

The game itself was a forgettable combo of collecting cards and resources to turn into tentacles. The tile layout is randomised and we found ourselves concentrating on one corner that seemed most useful. I felt it could have done with something to move the tiles around as well as the octopus. It’d be interesting to see how a second play of it went but I’m not in any hurry to do so.

Courtisans

A nice nasty game. You have three cards each turn and you play one to yourself, one to one of your opponents and one to the centre of the table. The ones played to the centre cause each of the suits to be worth more or less points at the end of the game. You have to be nasty and try to make everyone else have less points so don’t play it with people who are likely to feel they are being picked on. Probably better with more than the three players that we had at the time.

Crusaders Thy Will Be Done

As the friends I was playing with commented, this game of moving around on a map and growing your influence in different areas could have had any number of themes, so why not pick the entirely unproblematic theme of killing Muslims. (Just for the avoidance of doubt they were being highly sarcastic.) I liked the roundel kind of movement and the way the game worked on the whole, but, yeah, war themes sometimes work for me, I guess I’m happy to gun down cardboard Nazis, but here I definitely felt I’d prefer to pick a game with a different theme please.

Dinner in Paris

I’d played this one on Board Game Arena and quite liked it so I picked it up in the Airecon Bring & Buy sale. It’s a fairly simple game of collecting ingredients to open different sorts of restaurants and then laying out tables in the square to score points by completing objectives based on the shapes of the tables or the board features they are next to. I made a complete hash of teaching the game the second time I played it - reminder to self not to try and teach games whilst tired! Negative point for playing in real life rather than online is that all those tables are a bit of a pain to set up and the 3D restaurants kind of get in the way of looking at the board. But I still quite like it, and I also like that the theme is entirely unobjectionable!