I must admit that I did not know much about Ryan’s work going into this interview. Of course I knew about Dinosaur Comics, but as someone who is much more focused on the art side of comics, I rather quickly dismissed it as a cute gag, and not really the kind of comics I wanted to spend my time on. But of course over the years I did come to become dimly aware of its brilliance. So I’m eternally grateful to Adam Prosser for getting Ryan to come on the show. It really was a huge pleasure talking to him. He is clearly a highly intelligent, kind, generous and incredibly witty person who impressed me no end.

Pewfell has a great balance of absurd fun and whimsical world-building, and Whelon’s artwork does an energetic and colorful job of bringing it all to life. A long-standing Web favorite great to see in book form!

I backed this comic on Kickstarter, and I am super glad I did. This comic reminds me of Knights of the Dinner Table. Completely tongue in cheek humor. A little more satirical and biting than KODT. The story line flows along quite nicely. Most characters are a mix of likeable and villainous, which I appreciate.
I also like the solid drawing style. I am not a fan of the watercolor or “sketchy” or noir styles of drawing ( sorry; not an artist and I don’t know the real names.) The panels are very standard format and easy to follow, like reading a book. (Maybe I am just too old, but comics that make you guess the order of the panels and they are all kinds of sitting on top of each other can be very tough to read. Visually appealing? Sure. Otherwise, difficult to pull off. Anyway, i don’t have to worry about that here.) There are some more intricate, beautifully colored, larger panels mixed in to give the book an impressive mix. Overall, i am happy with the coloring and shading.
The storylines are clever enough and each one is satisfying by itself, but they also weave together nicely to create a larger story arc. Whelon and Prosser have a solid serialized story going on here. I will definitely be returning for more Pewfell!

This series has been a staple in my comic reading for many years. If your a fan of Terry Pratchett’s work, you’ll love Pewfell!

A beautiful book, gorgeous drawings and colours. There aren’t many pages- but on every double page spread there is a picture of a fairy tale with items/people hidden in the pictures you have to find. I wouldn’t pay RRP for it- I don’t think it is thick enough to warrant that price, however half price would be good value.

Chuck’s awesome cartooning skills know no equal, while the puzzles themselves are great fun for the whole family. Wish there were more activity books out there this good!

My boys couldn’t keep their hands off this book from the moment it entered the house. It really does suit all ages. It launched my 6-year old into drawing a slew of his own search-and-find books, while my 10-year old was possessed with figuring out the hidden code puzzles. We still haven’t figured out all the puzzles, and that’s fine by me! The colorful illustrations are wonderfully imagination-inspiring, and the characters and writing style are tons of fun. I hope Chuck does another… and another…!

Fantastically detailed… brilliant

My 5 year-old daughter loves this book! She’s even tried putting frosting on her nose and saying the shrinking spell. The colorful illustrations are eye-catching, we can’t wait to turn the next page. This book is a sweet story that shows us how to be kind and grateful.

My preschool class is sure to enjoy it too. I’m putting this book in my lesson plans every year. It’s a “Must Read” for anyone with a sweet tooth and an imagination.

Enjoyable alternative to Talisman and Munchkin. Faster than both. Easier to play too. Fun artwork great theming. A winner overall and a definite preference to Talisman, Prophecy and Munchkin.

A great game with stunning components. I really enjoy the game and my kids (age 10 and 11) can’t get enough of it. It’s a lighthearted game that we have played many times, often consecutively. The game is a laugh factory and using the less obvious choices for characters allow adults to play against younger players without having to hold back too much.

The game description fit what I was looking for to a T. Adventure game with a short play time, easy play and humor qualities. The cartoonish art work makes for a light hearted approach to the game, with lots of laughing.

Nice little game. Fun and easy to play with the family.

This is a light game with comical artwork that is fun to play with the family. It’s length is just right for the complexity and it generates a lot of table chat and FUN!

kept them quite for hours

It’s been a great success with my daughter (almost 3-years of age) from the first glimpse. It is now a daily activity: she picks up one or two of the penguins, by turns, and looks hard until she finds it/them. Very enjoyable activity for the both of us.

kids love it

Yup, twice as good as the basic Nile set.

Not just for kids! Love it. Lots of fun. 1

Grandson was delighted with this book. His Dad enjoyed it too!

delivered fast and my grandson loves it we spend happy hours finding the wreached things

Stocking filler, looks good fun and more interesting than Wally!

excellent

Bought it as a little gift alongside adopting a penguin for my 27yr old daughter(!) She and her friends had great fun with both this and the Magic Growing Penguin!

This caught my eye in the library. My son is a little too young for Where’s Wally, but I like him to practice looking for things in pictures (like Can you see Sassoon?), and this has the advantage of using scenes from famous fairy tales, so familiar characters and stories are there and can be talked about.

We loved this. He’s nearly 4 and concentrated really well, recognising some scenes without needing a prompt (Hansel and Gretel features the most delicious house!).

On each page it’s not too onerous, you’d spend maybe 3-5 minutes (depending on how much help you offer) searching for the 10-12 items and people it asks for. Sometimes multiple numbers are needed (5 acorns, 3 bats). And in the next pictures sometime and characters can be seen again, so it’s entertaining noticing them in the wrong scene.

We knew almost all the stories but even if you don’t it’s still fun to search and there’s a lot going on, just like in Where’s Wally. It prompted me to find The Pied Piper book actually, so he’d know the story.

A few illustrations were odd – Aladdin’s genie looks like Kang/Kodos from The Simpsons, and the princess isn’t called Jasmine but the original name from the Arabian Nights (I think), which children probably won’t know.

It’s good to search for a number of something, it really helps memory and concentration and the pictures are good enough to remind a child of the whole story outside of the scene.

Loved the style of drawing – Wally-like in a way but different at the same time.

Definitely has longevity and can be looked at multiple times, and either with an adult or without. Would make a great Christmas presents for 3-6 year olds.

Originally posted at http://www.throatpunchgames.com, a new idea everyday!

Game- Battle Merchants
Producer- Minion Games
Price- $50
Set-up/Play/Clean-Up- ~2.5 hours
Players- 2 to 4
TL; DR- You will never have so much fun fostering warfare! 95%

Basics- Let’s make some money! In Battle Merchants, you play the role of a weapon supplies for different fantasy races during a time of great war. This game is played across four seasons. In each season, players take turns doing one action until three new battles happen and the war begins. Each turn you can do one of four things: get weapon skill cards, build weapons, sell a weapon, or draw a kingdom card. By getting different weapon skill cards for each of the four weapons, your skill building each weapon type increases. This is only important for when fights occur at the end of a season. Building weapons allows you to build up to three weapons to sell. Selling weapons allows you to sell weapons to a spot on the board that wants a weapon you have for money. Each race at war is fighting on two fronts, and these fronts will require one of the four weapons for each spot on their side of the conflict. The factions won’t buy a weapon they don’t want, so you have to diversify enough to be able to sell all the weapon types. When you sell to a side of a conflict you get money and a token for that race. The more tokens you have for a race, the more money you get each time you sell to them in the future. When both sides of a battle have weapons, then a battle token is moved to the center of the board, and the next battle token is revealed allowing more weapons to be sold to the sides of that conflict. If a conflict doesn’t have a battle token as it was moved in a previous season, then you can still sell to that battle again. Kingdome cards give the player extra abilities and powers that provide new strategies for winning the game. When three battle markers are moved to the center for that season, then each player get one round before the time of war. At each battle with weapons on each side during the time of war, the weapon skill of each player’s weapon is compared and the higher skill says while the winner collects the defeated weapon as a marker of conquest and extra points at the end of the game. Weapons that are still on the board at the end of the time of war need to be maintained, so the player who made those weapons gets extra money. After four seasons and the times of war associated with them, just like life, the player with the most money wins.

Mechanics- This is a deceptively simple game that has lots of deep strategy. On a turn, you can only do one action, so the game moves at a good clip while still having to make important decisions. Everybody starts out on equal footing, so you have to think fast and figure out how best to procedure. My only problem with this game is a run away victor problem. As winners get both points at the end of the game for most defeated weapons and extra points/money for having weapons on the board at turn end, a player who wins the first battle of the game can develop an unopposed lead pretty quickly. 4.5/5

Theme- You do feel like a weapons dealer in a fantasy war. The boards are cartoony enough to make it light hearted, but there is the undercurrent of making money off bloodshed. In fact, a strategy you can take is to sell weapons to BOTH sides at one battle. You get a win money for weapons attendance at a fight, the sale of both weapons, and defeated weapons for points. That right there nails the theme of being a cold hearted weapons dealer. 5/5

Instructions- The instructions are not bad but are something you have to read very carefully to really get all the small details. It’s a half sheet style of rules folded to make several pages in the rulebook. The rules do teach the game well, but there are a number of fiddly rules that can really change the game. These rules could use a bit more emphasis. Also, some rules are presented in examples, and that would be great, but the rules are not presented before or outside the example. That’s a pet peeve that makes the game somewhat hard to completely understand your first time through. However, after that initial first game, you will be playing this game like a champ. 4.5/5

Execution-I like what comes in this box. It’s got great cards with some fun, cartoony art. The boards are all great cardboard. The tokens are nice chunky cardboard. My one small problem with this game is the weapon skill cards. It took me ten minutes to find what the rules meant by the different colored backs. During game set-up, you separate the spring/summer weapons cards from fall/winter cards. What that means is some of the weapon skill cards will have colored spring/summer sections of the center season wheel, while the fall/winter will be light brown and the reverse will be true for the fall/winter cards. It’s not a major problem by any means, but I hope it helps you understand what that means when you play! 5/5

Summary- This is a great game. The theme might not be for everybody as you do play a conniving war profiteer in a fantasy setting. However, I enjoyed being the bad guy. The mechanics are fun; even they are not completely balanced. I liked the art and the physical build of the game. Overall, this is a great game that I wish I could play with more players. 95%

My 8 yr. old son loves this. It is an opportunity for him to be silly and free with writing, which he normally hates.

All the different pieces are so funny, my kids have loved playing with this. You get a surprising amount of use out of it, for it being so small. The covers are slick so you can peel the stickers off and put different ones on and such. There are different scenes on the inside covers you can build on. Definitely a good use of a couple bucks.

Very cute monsters, and a great thing to stick in your purse to entertain the kiddos!

‘Where’s Waldo’ for penguin lovers! A fantastic book – my 7 and 5 year old love this book. Suitable for all ages.

We bought this for our girls (who are all homeschooled) and they read every single word of it, and proceed to talk about what they have read. The excitement of getting something in the mail beats electronic delivery any day of the week! The food section has been put to good use in our house with our eldest researching the origins of the foods covered, and regional variations of same. She then chooses one of the foods and tries to recreate it. Yum. Good magazine.

My son is obsessed with penguins since watching happy feet and that makes him really keen to find all the penguins in the book.
The book in itself is lovely, amazing designs and colours, wonderful to look at and will develop your child imagination.
Great item to pass some time while developing new skills.

It is a useful book in a classroom teaching how to use imagination and language to develop storylines. Good practice!

One of the best children magazines around. While each issues has a central feature (Egypt, Maya, etc,) it never fails to cover a broad scope of Archaeology. The history is covered and the methods used by scientists to recreate the past are explained in a concise and understandable format. The most important part, I feel, is that Dig will entertain, challenge, and teach an appreciation of the past.

These drawing books are great for kids. Easy to follow, understand. Kids enjoy that they can have a great drawing and they didn’t have to do all of the work themselves. I recommend.

Those Pesky Humans!: 2-4 Players, Ages 13+, Average Play Time = 90 Minutes

First, I’d like to comment that the artwork is great. The game manages to maintain a dungeon crawler theme while still being light and somewhat silly…and I say silly in the best way possible. My eleven year old son Vinnie Jr. commented on how funny some of the cards were, which only served to draw him in more than he already was.

I personally love how flexible the game allows you to be. I prefered playing the role of the monsters for a couple of reasons…the main one being that I could change the rules as I needed to in order to keep things fun and fair. If I thought that the kids were having a tough time with the monsters, I’d back off and not spawn as many, giving them a little breathing room. If I thought that they were having an easy time, I’d continuously spawn monsters until I felt that their egos were put back into check. This game allows me to adapt to the current situation and control everyone’s play experience…as both a parent and “dungeon master”, that turns out to be a lot of fun.

You can also play solo, if you’re willing to be creative. One person could hypothetically play both sides and make up their own rules as far as how aggressive the monsters are and etc. As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’ve always been of the belief that one can bend the rules (in regards to games) to make their play experience best suited for them. Who knows, maybe you’ll come up with a great variant that others might enjoy adapting…use your imagination!

The game only takes between an hour or two to play, which significantly ups its appeal in my book. As a full-time accountant and full-time dad, time is a precious commodity. I simply don’t have the time to devote entire weekends to one long dungeon crawler. This game progresses at just the right pace…that is…producing the end result fairly quickly while maintaining the feeling that you just embarked on an epic journey. The quick play variant included in the manual is also a welcome addition.

My son particularly liked managing a party and slaying a bunch of monsters…who wouldn’t? Out of all of the humans, he favored the magician class, mainly because he could teleport and “fry” a monster instantly with his special powers. Anthony Jr, the sixteen year old, enjoyed playing the rogue because she was able to get out of a lot of bad situations. He ended up using her to grab the gems and make a quick dash for the exit while using his paladin and a distraction card to pull my monsters away…quite ingenious.

I highly recommend this game for people who enjoy light dungeon crawlers. There are certainly others out there that are much deeper and take a lot longer to play, but if you aren’t the kind of person that gets enjoyment out of spending two hours to resolve one combat action, then “Those Pesky Humans!” is right for you.

I purchased this game at a local comic con for my daughter and I to play together. We very much enjoy playing. Every game is different and random, which is a HUGE plus when you are playing a pre teen that likes to play the same game over and over again. I would highly recommend this for game for parents and children in the pre teen to teenage range.

I recently bought this game out of curiosity and enjoyed it. I have only played it once but it seems fun. I think the normal players may have the advantage but with more play throughs of the game it can get better. Overall it’s a good game.

TOP THREE TO PASS:
1)Game seemed unbalanced.
2)Takes some time to set up
3)Kind of expensive for what it is.

TOP THREE TO GET:
1)Fans of D&D who want to get there kids into it.
2)Fun to play with a group.
3)It is re playable because the game is never the same.

Final thoughts:
I would recommend to D&D fans or any players wanting to get into role playing games. It is worth a shot but if you can find it for a little less it is well worth it.

I used these on a unit on science for my Kindergarten class. They made a space scene with some of these aliens and then wrote a story. They had great fun with the creatures.

Great book with a wonderful variety of mazes and pictures, my son couldn’t wait to finish it and even colored in some of the pictures of the aliens!

In a market flooded with fashion magazines for female tweens and teens, it’s unbelievably tough for mothers to find alternative reading materials in periodical format for their daughters — but Faces saves the day! Although it’s a slightly expensive subscription, the educational information it provides about the world — and especially about the world’s children — is well worth the cost. I HIGHLY recommend either substituting a Faces subscription for a fashion magazine one, or adding it to a tween/teen girl’s periodical library.

First, I’d like to commend the creators of this game for managing to make a card game that has fairly simple rules but offers a wide range of strategic play. I found that I was often thinking about which cards I should play and which cards I should hold onto until later. It seemed advantageous to play what you had so as to “control” the board. The more crops you have going at one time, the less options other players have.

I thought the game would take a while to play, seeing as how we had five players and thus had five seasons. I quickly discovered though that the later seasons were shorter since we were scoring cards in the interim, which results in the draw pile diminishing with every passing season. Season one took a good five to ten minutes whereas the fifth season was over within a few minutes. It balances out well into a nice thirty to forty-five minute game, depending on how many people are playing and how often they procrastinate.

I have to say, the kids picked up the rules very quickly. The biggest hurdle that they were often faced with was what they could and couldn’t play during the “plant or speculate phase”…after all, there are a lot of restrictions and stipulations as to what crops you can and can’t plant based on what is currently on the board. Once we played for a while, we got the hang of all of the special rules without having to consult the rulebook.

Vinnie Jr (11), Anthony Jr (16), Carolyn (13), and Jennifer (she’s not telling) all thought the game was fun and expressed interest in playing it again. They all couldn’t pinpoint why they thought the game was fun, just that it was. Jennifer, my girlfriend, can be picky when it comes to games and for her to admit that she’d play it again is high praise. We definitely have a winner for family game night.

I highly recommend this game to players of all ages. It serves as a great go-to game for when you want to introduce friends and family to the wonderful world of board games. Nile DeLuxor is simple enough to attract casual gamers but also in-depth enough to keep hardcore gamers from becoming bored…sort of a “not too hot and not too cold” deal.

Bottom Line: If you’re looking for a semi-casual card game that would appeal to all audiences, then you wouldn’t do wrong in picking up this little gem.

This is an excerpt from my full review on http://zombieparentsguide.blogspot.com

The game is fun but it requires a bit of thinking, remembering, and crafty strategy. Since the graveyard’s contents are visible to everyone, the player must decide which rows to focus on. Two players might fight over a row full of valuable objects and leave another player free to claim more objects in other rows. It helps to remember which zombie you put down first (as well as which ones others put down first) and their value. It’s not too hard to remember with three zombies, but as the players build more zombies it get more difficult to track. Attacking zombies also requires some strategy. The attacking player may open a spot on the board but may not get the chance to take the spot as other players take their turns first. It still could be helpful if a brainy zombie is taken out of the equation.

In the five or six times we’ve played the game, we’ve never put a zombie on the Start Player board. The advantage seems pretty minimal, though perhaps we haven’t played enough to see its tactical importance. In one game I thought I could use it on the last round to make sure I had a chance to attack any zombies trying to steal a piece of the Master from my vault when I had all three pieces. The thought occurred to me after the game, alas. The game I didn’t win!

The zombie theme fits well with the mechanics of the game. I had fun getting into the role of the mad scientist and trash talking or making commentary in character. The game is a little complicated but not too hard to teach. The instructions recommend playing without attacking or the Start Player action to make the first game easier. Going through the graveyard and assessing how much brain influence each player has space by space is a little bit tedious. Also, it is possible for players to get caught in “analysis paralysis” as they try to figure out the best move.

Overall, this is a fun game. We love that it allows two players and plays in under an hour (most of the time).

NILE DeLuxor places you and your friends into the roles of Egyptian farmers, planting and harvesting a diverse selection of crops, building monuments and speculating on crop futures, all while at the mercy of the mighty Nile river. The river is unpredictable and conforms to no man – flooding crops on a whim and forcing a player to harvest their crops, while at the same time allowing only certain types of crops to grow. If that weren’t enough, plagues of locusts may also find their way into your fields, consuming the largest crop! In the end, only one farmer can be successful, but it’s going to take keen observation and a little bit of luck to come out on top!

Gameplay:

Nile DeLuxor is a game for two to six players and the number of rounds (referred to in the game as “Seasons”) is based on the number of players. If you’re going to engage in a two player game, for example, you’ll only play through two seasons before naming a victor. If you can wrangle up five friends, five seasons will elapse and so on and so forth.

At the start, each player is dealt a hand of five cards. The game features a number of different card types, but the bulk of the cards are going to come in the form of crops – Wheat, Lettuce, Castor, Onion, Papyrus, Flax, and Grape. Ultimately, these are the cards that will determine your fate, so careful planning will go into the planting, trading and harvesting of these cards. Other cards will come into play as well, including:

Speculation Cards – Which features two different crops and are used to predict the outcome of the flood cards.
Flood Card – Which shows the current crop that is being flooded by the Nile.
A Plague of Locust Card – The one truly bad card in the game, these little guys will feast upon the largest crop currently in a player’s field .
Also in the game, we’ll find two other types of cards which make up the DeLuxor expansion:

Stone Cards – Similar to a crop card, stone cards are “planted” to create monuments, which we’ll talk about in a moment.
Monument Cards – The Sphinx, The Obelisk and the Wall. These cards provide a special ability to the player who builds it.
Once cards have been dealt, player one begins his/her turn by flipping over the top card from the draw pile, placing it face up on top of the flood card – whatever crop has been drawn has now been flooded by the mighty Nile (in the case of a speculation card, where two crops are shown, BOTH crops are flooded)! When a crop is flooded, two things occur:

First and foremost – any player who currently has the crop in play must harvest ONE card from their field. If the flooded crop is flax, for example, and player two has two flax cards, they take ONE of their flax cards and place it face down next to them. This is now their storage pile. Anytime a crop is flooded and you have to harvest it, the harvest card moves to your storage pile for use in trading and, ultimately, to determine the winner of the game.
Secondly, in the planting phase, the crop currently in a state of flooding cannot be planted. If you were holding on to some onions, for example, and onions come up on your turn as the flooded crop, you’re going to have to wait until your next turn to plant them – and hope that they don’t end up flooded again!
Once the flood phase is done, the player’s turn continues into the next phase – trading! In the trading phase, the player can take a combination of cards and trade with the draw pile in order to either gain a new card (or cards) or to create a new flood. Players are NOT allowed to trade with one another, as this would work against them in the end. Negotiations, no matter how fun they can be, would be somewhat damaging to the game and thus all trades are made with the draw deck following these basic rules:

Cards being traded MUST be from your hand or from your storage area. You cannot remove cards from your fields in the hopes of trading them in.
A player may take two cards from their hand or remove two cards from their storage (or one from each area) and sell them at market (the “market” being the draw deck) for one new card, which they place in their hand.
A player may alternately make an offering to the Egyptian deity Hapi – in this case taking their two cards (again in the combinations listed for the market trade) and discarding them in order to flip a new flood card. This is advantageous for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to screw other players in a number of different ways.
Trades can continue for as long as you have cards to trade – and believe me, trading comes in very handy.

Once the trading phase of the player’s turn has come to an end, it’s time to get out into the fields and start planting! If you don’t plant, you can’t harvest and if you don’t harvest, you don’t win. It’s just that simple.

As with the other phases, planting has a number of rules which player’s must abide by. To plant crops, you can do one of the following:

Take TWO or more cards of the same crop type and place them in a new field. If you have two papyrus cards, that works. If you have four lettuce cards, till that soil and plant those seed. If you have one onion, however, you’re out of luck. That is unless…
You plant two different crops using one card each. Take that onion and start a field, while at the same time taking that lone castor card you’ve got and create a second field! Planting one card is dangerous, as you’ll see in a moment, but it’s a way to get a crop on the table.
You can also add as many cards as you want to any existing field in your play area. If you’ve got castor, flax and onions in your field, and you have one card of each in your hand, feel free to plant them all!

Remember, you can’t plant crops that are currently represented on the flood card!

When planting, it’s also important to remember that players cannot, at any time, plant a crop in their fields that is already represented in another player’s field. If player one is growing lettuce, for example, player two can’t plant it – UNLESS they play more cards in their field than those in the opposing player’s field. To illustrate:

“Pete has two lettuce cards on the table. He’s been working diligently over time in the hopes that he can harvest his crop and keep his family fed with delicious, nutritious salad. He ends his turn and the next player up is Evie. She draws her flood card and it’s onions! That’s too bad, because Evie has four onions in her hand and only two lettuce cards – meaning she can’t plant onions, due to the flood and she can’t plant lettuce because she doesn’t have more lettuce cards than Pete. However, Evie is a smart cookie and decides to head to market in the hopes of making an equitable trade. She gives away two onions and is rewarded with a fresh new random card from the draw pile- a lettuce card. Now, Evie has three lettuce and a plan! Taking her three lettuce, she places them in her field, laughing manically, as Pete sighs. He removes his two lettuce and discards them. There will be no salad in the coming months for his family. Evie, however, managed to gain the upper hand through smart trading and a bit of cunning.”

The moral? No two players can have the same crop, but you can take a crop from another player by playing MORE cards in your field than your opponent has in theirs. And yes, the illustration was a true story.

If you opt not to plant, you can, instead, choose to speculate on crop futures. This is the “wheeling and dealing” part of the game. If you’ve got a speculation card in your hand, you can play it onto the table instead of planting a crop. In fact, you can play multiple speculation cards on the table instead of planting! Speculation cards cannot be harvested, but can be used to gain bonus cards. If you look at a speculation card, you’ll notice that it features two distinct crops. During the flooding phase, a speculation card causes those two crops depicted to become flooded. During the planting/speculation phase, however, you’re essentially betting on the next crop card to be downed by the mighty Nile! If you played a speculation card that had flax/papyrus and flax is flooded on the next player’s turn, you receive three bonus cards! If you had a second speculation card that featured flax/castor, you’d receive a total of six free cards! Is that great or what?

Of course, if you were to play the exact same speculation cards and wheat happens to be drawn, you get nothing. Plain and simple. Regardless – speculate, speculate, speculate! It may give you the upper hand in the end.

Finally, after all is said and done, once all the flooding, harvesting, trading, planting and speculation have been completed, the player draws two cards and play goes to the next person, who then starts their turn by flipping over the top card of the draw pile thus flooding a brand new crop! Play continues like this until the draw pile is exhausted, at which time the current season ends. Depending on the number of people, the draw pile is reshuffled and a new season begins. Once the final season is completed, the game is over and the victor is revealed…

But first, let’s talk about the expansion and how it works prior to ending our game!

If you add the expansion to NILE, you’ll place a new commodity into the game – Stone. Stone is “planted” in much the same way as a typical crop, but it works a bit differently in harvest phases. Planting stone uses the same planting rules, so you can either plant two stone cards (or more) at one time or plant one stone card, along with another crop. When a stone card is placed in your field, you’re granted one of the three monument cards included in the game. These monuments have special abilities and powers, all of which come in pretty handy:

The Sphinx – The Sphinx is generous and allows you to harvest TWO crop cards instead of one during your harvest phase.
The Obelisk – The Obelisk grants the player the power to gain three cards, instead of two during the draw phase. It also provides the player with double the cards for a successful speculation!
The Wall – The Wall is my favorite of the monuments, as it forces a player to play TWO more cards in their effort to usurp your field. If I have three lettuce, for example, a person would need four lettuce to force me to discard my field, but if I have the Wall in play, they would be required to have five, making it a bit more difficult to get rid of my field.

Once a person has a monument, they are free to use it until either another player steals it, which in this case is done in exactly the same manner as planting a crop another player has – you just need to have more stone than your neighbor, or if the monument is removed during the harvest phase (every time a stone card is drawn during the flood, you remove one stone. When you remove the last stone you had, the stone is discarded and the monument returns to the general play area, waiting to be created once more).

The expansion adds a lot to the game and is honestly the way I’ll play NILE from now on. It adds a bit more strategy and makes the game a little more cut-throat. Players can control as many monuments as they have stone fields to handle them, too!

Oh, before I get to the end of the game scoring mechanics, I’d like to talk about my favorite card – THE PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS! To put it simply, this is the only card in the game that can truly mess you up and believe me, it will mess you up! As I stated before, the only way to plant a crop type that’s already on the board is to pony up a field containing more cards than the player whose crop you wish to plant. To keep players from doing this, a smart farmer will keep adding cards to their field so that the cost to replace a field becomes more trouble than it’s worth! If I have six flax cards in my field, not many people are going to waste the time to put down a field of seven and force me to discard!

That’s where the locusts laugh in your face.

You see, when this card is drawn, something terrible happens. The largest crop yield in any ONE field is devoured, leaving that farmer cursing their fates. If there is a tie, all fields in the tie are consumed and many farmers will cry out to their respective deities in anguish, rueing the day they made the decision to plant so much flax! In NILE DeLuxor, there is but one plague card, but when that card is drawn (as it will be each and every season), someone gets screwed. Royally.

Honestly, I’ve been playing NILE DeLuxor for a number of days with a host of different people of all ages (and gaming interests) and have gotten in more games than I can possibly discuss. What’s really wonderful is that an average game of NILE, even with a full complement, is roughly a half an hour, meaning that you can cram a number of games into a short period of time if you’re really on top of it. The rules are so simple to learn, the game itself is easy to teach and the gameplay is easy enough that every person I introduced it to could get into it with little effort. My daughter absolutely loved the game, both enjoying the Egyptian thematic element and the whole concept of managing different crops. At nine years old, the basic strategy was easy enough to comprehend and she was busting my chops every chance she could get – be it from forcing me to discard whole crops (several times in a row) or simply harvesting more crops than I could keep up with due to her “mad trading skills”! Where we did run into trouble, both with her and some of the other play groups, was in the final scoring. I think people misunderstood how the victor is crowned in the end and instead of making sure to have at least one of every crop in their storage bin, players would simply harvest and plant what they had. In fact, in our first few sessions, we weren’t even trading as often as we did in later games, simply due to the fact that we didn’t see a benefit in it. Of course, as you get one or two games under your belt, you start to understand that trading is a crucial part of the game and that you can really cause a lot of damage by gaining an extra card from the market or praying to Hapi in order to cause another flood!

In the end, I found that two groups really got more out of it than the others. My daughter and her friends liked it and those who weren’t as hardcore about gaming enjoyed it. In all honesty, almost every person who played it enjoyed it in some way, but the hardcore gamers saw it more as filler than anything else – that game you play while someone is setting up Arkham Horror, for example. For the most part, however, the majority of those who played actually kept up through a number of several hours sessions – a task they said they’d love to do again.

As for me, I quite enjoyed NILE DeLuxor. I can see where the expansion makes the game more interesting (and is almost necessary to add more depth), without distracting from the relative simplicity of the gameplay. That’s not to say that the game itself is a simple one! The concept is easy to grasp, but there is a fair amount of strategy involved, a lot of which is purely observational. A favorite tactic of mine was to try and monitor which crops people had yet to plant and do my best to prevent them from ever being able to do so. In this way, I could attempt to harvest every crop, while forcing the other players to miss at least one, thus making me the winner. With four or more people, this tactic becomes insanely hard, but when you’re dealing with two or three, well, it’s certainly easier. The act of causing multiple floods in the same turn also offers up some nice opportunities to (hopefully) force people to harvest crops so that you can either eliminate their crop through the harvest itself or reduce their cards enough so that you can destroy their crop and plant it yourself. It’s a nasty tactic and it has it’s downside (they still get to harvest), but it does provide more opportunities to plant. Not to mention that you could harvest multiple times in the same turn (as my daughter loved to do). Her tactic of taking surplus from her storage area in order to cause more floods was brilliant!

In the end, this is a game I’d highly recommend. The rules are well written and simple enough to be grasped by a number of demographics, the gameplay is paced well and there is no downtime at all, the artwork and theme is delightful and well produced and the game itself is simply fun – for both a night of gameplay or a quick game at lunch!

* This review is a shortened version of a review I wrote for meeplesnextdoor.com *

This was a gift for a 9-year-old girl. She loves it and completely enjoys the book and loves learning to draw and try new crafts. Makes a great gift for a creative girl.

Bought this for my kid who’s been sucking up maze books by the bundle and this quickly became one of his favourites! Not your typical boring maze book; the illustrations are super fun and the mazes all have a “story” behind them. The illustrations are so good in fact the book actually doubles as a coloring book! Highly recommend…

An enjoyable, mostly self-contained story arc. Crwm is everything you could want in an apocalyptic demon-god.

Faces is packed with all kinds of information on a range of topics that spans the world. Issues cover individual countries and cultures or things that affect the whole world, like human rights. Its light but educational articles are accompanied by tons of photos, contests, plays or stories and topic related activities. Targeted at 9 to 14 year olds, it’s fun and interesting for adults as well.

FACES is a great magazine that lets children explore many cultures from around the world. Through folk tales, photos, and maps FACES takes its readers on an adventure that teaches them about the lives, traditions, and pastimes of many cultures. FACES’ target audience is between the ages of 9 and 14, but its interesting articles and entertaining themes are suitable for any reader looking for knowledge. You will learn about many places in the pages of FACES.