Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🦑 Run Silent, Run Deep...

2016, 2 teams of 1-4 players each Complexity: moderate
Submarine movies are always tense. Thrills are baked right there into the premise: a team of people in a life-or-death struggle where a thin layer of steel is the only thing between them and the briney depths. Captain Sonar, from Matagot Games, attempts to capture the tension of submarine warfare. It's a head-to-head strategy game in which two teams compete to find and destroy each other that can be played either in turns or in real-time. Let's See It In Action
In Captain Sonar, you and your team take on the roles of Captain, First Mate, Engineer, and Radio Operator in a state-of-the-art submarine. You have a chart of the terrain and four hit points, as well as a number of tools at your disposal to aid in the search for your opponent. In terms of gameplay, each crew member has their own mini-game to keep track of while coordinating with the captain to keep systems active and locate the other team…

⚾ Take Me Out To The Ballgame


2015, 2 players Complexity: light/moderate
Bottom Of The 9th is a two-player bluffing/deduction game played with dice. It pits the underdog home team against the traveling champions in a winner-take-all high-stakes half inning of baseball. The conceit of the game is that by some miracle the underdog home team has kept things at a tie so far, but they're exhausted. If this goes into extra innings, the champions are surely going to beat them. But if they can just score one run in the bottom of the 9th inning, then they win it all. Let's See It In Action
In Bottom Of The 9th, you and a friend compete head-to-head, one player as the underdog home team, one as the champions. You each pick a roster of players, six for the batting home team and two pitchers for the champions.

Pitching and batting are managed with dice rolls. The pitcher has two dice, one a standard d6, another that has sides labeled "S", "B", and "C" that det…

This weekend I went to a small board game conference in St. Louis called Geekway Mini--it's a smaller, more intimate version of the larger con Geekway To The West that runs in the summer.

Day 1: New con, new games, new opportunities to meet people and win games! Here's what I played on Friday.
Big City 20th Anniversary Jumbo Edition

City-building game that uses trade as a balancing mechanic. It was fine. Fun, very thinky, probably plays better with more than two people, though. The Jumbo Edition is unnecessarily huge and componenty. It's cool, I guess, but it feels like a gimmick and I would never pay the $100+ price tag for it. Also, it was my first game of the con and I punctured my finger on a tree on one of the models :(

It's A Wonderful World


Favorite of the con. It's an engine-builder where you draft cards in order to build your tableau and then use them to produce resources that you use to build your cards  It's easy to learn, plays fast, and there's…