Hi everyone! Thanks for visiting. Before we get to the Monday Brews I wanted to take this opportunity to once again point out that Scoville is on Kickstarter. The campaign ends on Friday and is flying it’s way to the last stretch goal. At $80,000 Tasty Minstrel Games will put pepper shaped components into the game instead of cube-based components. Here’s an example of how much more awesome things will look when we hit that goal with your help:

Wow! Those peppers really spice up the art!

So go check out my game on Kickstarter! Thanks!

Okay. Now to the Monday Brews. I realized that I was getting a little monotonous with my descriptions of beers that I’ve had numerous times. So I’m changing up the way I do the Monday Brews articles a little bit. Instead of writing out a little blurb for each beer and each game I’m going to feature one of each and simply list the rest unless it was new to me, in which case I’ll write a little one-liner type thing. This saves all of us time since you don’t have to read the same boring descriptions each week and I don’t have to type them.

So let’s check out the Boards & Barley that I enjoyed this past week…

The Barley:

I thought it was a weird spelling of “Sudoku” at first.

BARLEY SPOTLIGHT: Toppling Goliath Pseudo Sue Pale Ale

I’ve found I am starting to enjoy Pale Ale’s more and more recently. Typically they are where I draw the line for hops in my beers. This one was fairly hoppy, coming in at 50 IBUs. Fortunately it didn’t have a lingering bitter aftertaste that is common among IPAs and more potent Pale Ales. So I enjoyed this one.

• Fleming’s Scotch Ale (My Homebrew)
• NEW! Green Flash Saison Diego – When I cracked this one it foamed over for about 10 minutes and left a little mess on the counter.
• NEW! New Glarus Spiced Ale – This was a decent spiced ale that wasn’t overly spiced.
• New Glarus Cabin Fever Honey Bock
• NEW! Big Wood Jackpine Savage – This was borderline too hoppy for me, but came in a pretty cool can.

The Boards:

BOARDS SPOTLIGHT: Scoville

A near-endgame field condition from a recent 6 player game of Scoville. (Prototype copy)

I was honored at a recent game night when people requested to play Scoville. I had my copy along to show some people the awesome artwork, but I wasn’t expecting to play it. But we got in a tight 6 player game. I was able to pull out the victory with a big final move to get a 24 point recipe.

My favorite thing about Scoville is how the map (planting/harvesting) mechanic works. There are so many interesting decisions of which pepper to plant, where to plant it, and which direction to move your meeple when harvesting. I can’t wait to play it again!

If anyone has any questions about Scoville, please let me know by posting a comment at the bottom of this blog post. Thanks so much!

And here are the other games I played this past week, including two new games.

• NEW! Eight Minute Empire Legends – This was an interesting game in that it plays quickly and there is a fair amount of strategy, but it definitely takes more than 8 minutes.
• Skyline
• Compounded
• NEW! Karesansui – I think this game has a bunch of potential as an auction game. Unfortunately I was terrible at it.
• 7 Wonders
• Long Shot

Designer’s Corner:

As you can imagine I’ve been spending quite a bit of my time focused on the Scoville Kickstarter campaign. That means I haven’t really been doing too much with my current game designs. This was an interesting game in that it plays quickly and there is a fair amount of strategy, but it definitely takes more than 8 minutes.

The one game I have been doing some work on is Brooklyn Bridge. One thing that was pointed out to me was that the worker placement locations will have to change based on player number. It seems like such an obvious thing when I think about the design, but it was something that I just hadn’t thought of. So I can use that information to start to put together a prototype where it will work with anywhere from 2-5 players. That’s what is currently in my design queue.

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So those are the Boards & Barley that I’ve been enjoying. What have you been enjoying?