It's late, the table is buried under face-up cards, and our fort has just fallen. A fire we let spread one turn too long, a creature we never found time to hunt down, and the Satrapy tipped over without asking us. We lost. And the first words around the table weren't "right, let's pack up," they were "let's run it again." That is exactly when I understood what makes Oltrée rare. I brought it back from Essen in 2021, having spotted it months earlier during the lockdowns, and S

It's nearly midnight, the box is closed, and Ariane asks me the only question that matters after a game night: "Did you like it?" And for the first time in years of playing, I had no answer. "I don't know." We'd just wrapped the first act of The Dark Quarter, spread over several sessions, we'd had a good time, and we were completely unable to say whether we liked this game. Session after session, that uncertainty never went away, and I think that's exactly what we need to tal

Some games send you straight back to your first video-game loves. As I laid down the opening cards of Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot, I rediscovered the feeling of a good old point-and-click, that "click here, pick up this object, talk to this character" I used to do as a kid in front of a screen. Except here, everything happens on the table, one card after another. My problem is that I never managed to finish it in one sitting. Short on time, I picked it up agai

The story of a masterful slap It was 10:30 PM on a Wednesday night when I put away the Arcs box with a feeling I hadn't experienced in years: absolute humility in the face of a board game. Me, who plays Pax Pamir, who tackled Root and isn't afraid to take on challenging games, I had just been taught a masterful lesson by an opponent. The difference? He had already played the game before. I had charged in headfirst with my veteran space gamer confidence. That evening marked th