In Dutch we have DROL, Dicht recht, open links. So close right, open left as a very strict translation. But DROL is also Dutch for turd.

Sadly it no longer is my field of work. Switched to IT when I couldnt find a job or phd in behavioural biology. Turned out I like IT quite a lot.

We have 1 more week of travel, visiting a rain forest at the east coast. Then back to Europe and to work.

Awesome! Thanks for the effort!

We dont mind that it eats the spiders here, they are huge and scary :p

We ended up at Madagascar because it was my long live dream. I studied biology and arranged a place for my thesis. However for my bachelor I heard I wasnt allowed to travel outside of Europe. And for my masters there wasn’t anyone educated highly enough to supervise me.

So when we were brainstorming for our honeymoon, my now wife came with this idea. It has been an amazing trip so far, but also quite intense. A lot of travelling in a 4x4, long days and early rises. The people here are quite poor, and that makes the travel a bit conflicted. But my biologist heart is really happy. We have seen amazing animals and visited wonderful places.

It is the Dutch railway company, so no, I wouldnt expect you to know this as a foreigner.

But I am a little sad now I am not part of the lucky ones…

I am not fully familiar with the term quarterbacking, but I assume it is where somebody effectively plays the whole game and tells everybody what to do?

I think if you are aware of it, it is easier to stop quarterbacking. When I play it I try to give advise on hotspots for problems, but I wont plan somebody elses turn. But they decide. But the game can be prone to it. You could always play with your cards closed, then people have less information, which prevents 1 person from figuring it all out, but might complicate the game some extra as well

We have had some busy weeks last weeks, so the amount of games is liwer compared to normal. This weekend we finally had some time again ^^

We played 2 games of good ol’ pandemic, which we horribly lost. Mostly due to the lab expansion, which we hadnt played in a while and forgot the proper strategy for.

We also played a game of Theotihuacan, but it isnt my game. We have played it a couple of times now, but I am tense the whole way through, as there are so many actions and every single one counts so much. If anyone has some experiences with this game and can tell me your experiences I would love to hear. It is a game my fiance loves, and I would like to at least like it as well…

Sprawlopolis is very light weight and offers a lot of replayability.

We have laminated (I believe that is the english word) clever, qwixx, knaster and knister so that we can bring 1 set of dice and play those all.

We really like regicide, which is just 1 pack of cards.

Lastly you have some (card)games with a small footprint, such as The Crew, or Cahoots, or Pickomino.

Some that I havent heard but love are Pandemic and Spirit island.

And as a hidden gem: Heroes of Tenefyre and sprawlopolis. Heroes is a deckbuilder dungeon crawler where the new cards in your deck are the monsters you slay. Sprawlopolis is a city builder the size of a small wallet, which you can easily take with you. There are 3 challenges out if 18 which decide how the game will play, which asks for different tactics every time.

We played a lot of the Isofarian guard last week, finished chapter 2 from the first campaign. They announced a couple of changes to the rules last week, and we really like them.

We also had our first introduction to Arnak at some friends. I like it, but I feel that you have to do too much, without becoming good at anything.

Lastly we finally git around continuing our alphabet challenge with Noria and Onirim :D

The crew! Both versions of it allow for replayability as you have different objectives every game. It is a trick taking game, so they might be a bit familiar with it due to other games like bridge. And it is cheap. Only thing that might take them a bit to get used to is that it is coop.

Another simple one would be take 6 (nimmt 6).

7 wonders duel is such a good basegame. The focus on the limitted ways to victory is its main strength, and the toght card pool. It is difficult to add something equally strong, without adding too many side focusses, or inbalances. We play mainly the base game due to this.

We spent most of our week discovering 2 kickstarters that just landed, The Witcher and Isoforian guard.

The Witcher is very easily becoming a slog when playing at higher levels. We played a 4 player game that lasted 3 to 4 hours. It is a lot of fun, but the sweetspot for the game feels around 1 or 2 players. Lastly we are thinking anout adding some extra homerules, as you can now win the game by only fighting lvl 1 monsters. This is also something I see a lot of on BGG forums.

The Isoforian guard is so much fun! Really like the bag drafting gameplay, and the story. The game is tougher than we thought. We wanted to continue with the story, but we got our asses kicked and learned that grinding might be needed to get some better equipment and abilities.