If May was a slow month of gaming then June turned out to be glacial as the unusually pleasant weather and a two week holiday saw me tied up doing lots of other things. Consequently, I only managed to play 7 games of 7 different titles, with 2 of them being new to me. The new games were:
== NEW GAMES ==
Icarus – 1 play – 8
First Published 2015
This was a really great surprise as I wasn’t expecting too much from it but it definitely worked fantastically well for me. I’d describe it as Knizia’s take on Liar’s Dice / Bluff, although with cards rather than dice. Revealing a card gives everyone more information but you have flexibility in upping your bid to any of the seven different suits / colours. Production quality is only so-so – the cards are fine but the box and board detract from the overall appearance. Not sure why this wasn’t picked up by one of the usual German producers.
Sakura – 1 play – 7
First Published 2018
Sakura is another push-your-luck game from Reiner Knizia where you use cards to move the player pawns and the emperor with a view to getting your pawn closest to the emperor when he reaches a scoring space without bumping into him beforehand. Fun and quick but not one of his top-rier games. Will definitely play from time to time but it’s not likely to be a regular.
== OTHER GAMES PLAYED THIS MONTH ==
1x Voodoo Prince
1x The Fox in the Forest
1x Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld
1x Too Many Cooks
1x Habe fertig
It was nice to get a bunch of card games that haven’t been played for a while back to the table. Al Capone may be my favourite in the Mystery Rummy series but I probably should play all of them again to check. Also, Habe Fertig seems to have been overlooked by many but it is another brilliantly simple card game by Steffen Benndorf.
== STATE OF THE COLLECTION ==
I added 4 new titles to the collection: Mondrian: The Dice Game, Icarus, Sakura and Lost Cities: To Go. I also reacquired three games and parted company with four, which means my total collection now stands at 568.
My list of unplayed games is up from 2 to 3 and my Game of the Month was Icarus, which turned out to be a fantastic variant of Liar’s Dice / Bluff.