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1 week ago | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
Social deduction is one of those genres that is just inherently fun and understandable. The foundation of a large group playing cooperatively while a smaller group tries to accomplish a diametrically opposed goal is simple and compelling in a way that additional complexity threatens to undermine. Avalon and Secret Hitler are prime examples: every round, the table elects a team that will advance the game state towards the good or bad side winning.
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2 months ago | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
The trick taking craze doesn't seem to be losing any steam, so everyone's showing off their chops by putting their own spin on the genre. I got my hands on Pete Wissinger and Inside Up's D&D themed entry, and right out the gate, it's got more going on than any other I've played (maybe excluding Arcs). Cards don't have values on them, instead everyone's got a set of polyhedral dice they roll at the start of each round or when playing a card if they don't like the values they initially rolled.
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2 months ago | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
Ever since Star Realms took the deck building genre by storm, it's felt like every new innovation in the genre that caught my eye and stuck to the two player count wound up being a banger. Undaunted? Awesome. Kapow? Sleeper hit. Star Wars? I'm a fanboy, so of course I love it. But to my eternal shame I ignored For Glory when it debuted, mostly because I couldn't care less about Rome. Thankfully, it came up in our podcast about deckbuilding; I noticed we had a copy in our backlog and checked it out.
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2 months ago | 
gamingtrend.com | A Kay Purcell |Abdul Saad |Nick Dubs
Nick plays and reviews board games to kill time while it cultivates the requisite mystique to become a cryptid that warns small towns of impending doom.
Number of Articles
101
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2 months ago | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
I’m mad at Chris Matthew. Like I said in my review, I quite enjoy my time with An Age Contrived, but the Folklore & Pilgrimage expansion fills in some holes I didn’t notice were there until I played with it, and now I’ve got to wait until it’s out to add it to my copy. There are the two additional gods, which are nice and all, but the real stars of the show are the titular Folklore and Pilgrimage modules.
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2 months ago | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
I’m absolutely obsessed with economic games. Turns out, as much as capitalism is a deeply flawed system that humanity will either abandon or be destroyed by, it’s a great foundation for a collection of cardboard with no stakes.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
I’m garbage at baking. It probably doesn’t help that I never dabbled until I lived at altitude, making the learning curve that much steeper, but as much as I’m enchanted by the idea of expanding my cooking skills, my style is more going with my gut and eyeballing than the exacting amounts, timings and temperatures that baking requires. I always enjoy my time with the hobby, but very rarely does anything beyond adequate result.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
I have rather stringent rules for when I choose to sleeve one of my games, and as a result, I can count on one hand the number of games in my 80+ game collection that are sleeved. Pretty much, a game’s got to require a lot of shuffling decks whose awkward sizes don’t lend themselves to it like Heat, or it’s a game that’ll never see another printing like Forbidden Stars. Pagan meets none of those requirements, so why did I sleeve it immediately?
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
gamingtrend.com | Nick Dubs
Making a dungeon crawler that both appeals to and is actually viable for everyone is the game design philosopher’s stone: a hypothetical ideal to strive for, accepting you’ll probably never attain. Of course, I’m not suggesting that Chip Theory’s Elder Scrolls has attained that mark; at the risk of spoiling my review, it’s got its fair share of flaws. What I am suggesting is that the flaws feel like they come from a design philosophy that doesn’t accept limitations.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
gamingtrend.com | Mike Dunn |Steven Starkey |Nick Dubs |Mike Case |Mark Julian |Eric Deutsch | +2 more
Convention season was very intense in 2024, with GamingTrend attending more tabletop cons than any other year prior. In fact, we went to so many conventions this year we still have content to publish on our Youtube channel from Origins and Gen Con (so keep your eyes peeled!). Needless to say, we’ve been very busy! Unfortunately, our Best of Gen Con Awards piece kept of being put on the back-burner, which is why you are reading this in late November instead of early September.
