Plastic bricks were a key part of my childhood. I have fond memories of tearing up my hands rummaging through a big tub of bricks that may or may not have actually held the one piece that I was searching for. Over time, my siblings and I developed amazing characters and lore of the hijinks that happened in our brick-world, leading me to naturally want to share that with my kids as they grow up. Epic Brick Adventures is designed to couple the world of bricks with the world of roleplaying games to facilitate creativity and storytelling without any age limitations. Ahead of the Kickstarter, I was able to get a look at the Introductory Guide and the Circus Catastrophe Intro Adventure to see if this game is more than just D&D with bricks.

Epic Brick Adventures: Building You Up

Epic Brick Adventures provides a rules framework for players to use their existing collections of bricks and plastic figures in a roleplaying game setting. Minifigures become MiniHeroes as a Brickmaster leads the players through an adventure of their own devising, serving as the Gamemaster (in conventional parlance).

MiniHeroes have Abilities broken out into Creative, Smarts, Willpower, Sense, Muscle, and Zip with concepts of Gusto and Clutch replacing energy and hit points respectively. Tack on an Occupation and some basic equipment…

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The Last Spell: The Board Game is one of those rare games that I can be unapologetically negative about. Contrary to what you might think reading some of my reviews, while I can be critical, I generally try to understand what the design was attempting to accomplish and if it accomplished that goal.

The Last Spell: The Board Game successfully accomplishes the aim of adapting a video game into a board game at what appears to be a 1:1 level of fidelity. Unfortunately, because of this, there is almost zero reason to play the board game adaptation.

This game is a waste of time.

Is there a good thing, Thomas?

Well, the aesthetics are kinda cool. I guess?

The premise of the game is that some wizards cast a big spell that killed nearly everything in the world, and the remnants group together in small towns bravely defending themselves against the dying of the light or some such thing. There’s purple mist. There’s a pixel art style that is very Dark Super Nintendo. Reminds me a bit of Super Boss Monster, and the text is reasonably easy to read. The miniatures for the player heroes are cool.

Unfortunately, beyond that, everything else is a travesty.

The game is a…

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Neuroshima Hex has known three previous editions, each ultimately widening the pool of available factions and improving on what was already a very good design. Now, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, publisher Portal Games has rebooted the line again. Blessed are we who live to see such times. Finally, you can own a base set of Neuroshima Hex with a box that doesn’t look like absolute butt. Aesthetics was never the point of all this, but goodness.

Inside that box, you’ll find four factions’ worth of tiles with which to play this marvelous game. Do the tiles look better? Listen, there are limits to what you can manage when designing a game that has to convey a large amount of information in a small amount of space. Do the tiles look good? No. Do they look bad? No! They’re a miracle of legibility. Don’t worry about it.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward: on your turn, you draw up to three tiles, discard one, and then play, discard, or save the others. Your tiles are a mix of Troops that attack and hinder your opponent, Modules that provide buffs and debuffs to the pieces on the board, and Actions, which can do all variety of things depending on the faction. As the game progresses, the board gets…

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