Welcome to another Monday. I’m hope you are having a fantastic day! I am. That’s because over the weekend Scoville funded on Kickstarter! Woo hoo! Now we are on to the stretch goals!

Before we get into the Boards & Barley that I enjoyed last week I wanted to inform you that Tasty Minstrel Games has posted a contest to Board Game Geek. Go check it out for your chance to win a copy of Scoville: BGG Scoville Contest.

Okay… now let’s get on to the good stuff. As usual we’ll start with the Barley.

The Barley:

New Belgium Folly Pack

New Glarus Cabin Fever Honey Bock: Again… because it’s so good!

Cisco Brewing Grey Lady Witbier: My friend Ben had some of these. I had not heard of this brewery before. They are located in Nantucket

St. Francis Sloth Brown Ale: I had not heard of this brewery/restaurant until Friday. They opened in 2009 in Milwaukee, WI. It was a pretty good beer and I’m looking forward to a stop at their brewery the next time I’m in the area!

New Belgium Mighty Arrow: I bought a variety 12-pack that had a revival beer called Mighty Arrow. It was a very decent pale ale and the bitterness did not linger. The other cool thing about it was that it had the old label on it.

New Belgium Trippel: I really like the clean and simple approach for the new labels for New Belgium brewing. They still maintain the New Belgium character but now look much better. Nice move on their part. Also, their Trippel was pretty good.

North Coast Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout: My wife and I hosted a Winter Olympics party and I was planning to buy the large plastic 2-liter type bottle of crappy Russian beer that costs about $2. Alas, my FLBS (Favorite Local Beer Store) did not have any. So I went with a Russian Imperial Stout. While it’s not a Russian beer, it at least had the word “Russian” in it. People didn’t complain.

The Boards:

X-Wing: I think X-Wing is great! It’s a lot of fun flying through space trying to take out your opponents and trying to figure out what they are going to do. My biggest problem, however, is that my friend’s wallet is hurting a little from all of the stuff that you must have. Okay… maybe you don’t “need” to have it all, but you should!

Awesome Awesomeness!

Belfort + Expansion Expansion: We got to try out the new Expansion Expansion, which features the best name for an expansion ever! I thought it was an awesome addition to the game. With the expansion you choose one of the characters in a reverse draft each round. That character can provide you with a bonus ability during that round or they can be used to let you expand one of your properties. Expanding a property gives you another scoring opportunity, which can be really useful. Overall I am glad to have backed the project. The Expansion Expansion adds a great level to the game and gives you a cool way to build an engine in the game. I’m looking forward to playing again!

Ingenious: This is one of those stupidly simple games that I wish I had designed. I mean, line up similarly colored components for points. That’s the game in a nutshell. It’s so simple, yet also challenging and fun as well. My only beef with the game is that it is possible to end with 0 points by the bad luck of never drawing a certain color. I wish that wasn’t possible. Oh well. I guess I should design my own stupidly simple game that fixes that problem.

Designer’s Corner:

With all this Scoville stuff on my mind I’ve been able to come up with what I think will be a really interesting expansion to the game. I’m not going to give away any details just yet but I’m pretty excited about it.

In other design news, talking on podcasts lately a lot of people have been asking me what I’ve got in the pipeline. The big game in the pipeline is Brooklyn Bridge. It’s my time-based worker placement game with a twist. I’ll eventually make a post all for the game, but the idea is you have a crew that is working on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s your job to send your workers to purchase resources and utilize them as best as possible. The crew that has contributed the most to the bridge at the end will be the winning crew.

With only 11 days left for the Scoville Kickstarter campaign I can say I’m definitely looking forward to getting back to designing again. The last few weeks have been pretty devoid of design efforts. Go back Scoville so that we can get pepper components rather than cubes!

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Thanks for reading! What Boards & Barley have you been enjoying lately?