Welcome back to Boards & Barley! I hope you all had an enjoyable Easter weekend. It was a VERY slow week in terms of enjoying Boards & Barley. So today’s Monday Brews will be very short. Let’s start with the Barley…

The Barley:

BARLEY SPOTLIGHT: St. Bernardus Abt 12 Quadrupel

I enjoyed this fine beer on tap from a new local establishment that has an outstanding list of beers on tap. Most of them are European beers. Many of those are beers I haven’t ever seen on tap. I will definitely be going back there to enjoy more awesome tap beers!

The Quadrupel was quite exceptional. But weighing in at 10% abv means it should be a slow drinking beer. I didn’t drink it slowly. It was too good to drink slowly.

The other beer I enjoyed last week was a Belhaven Scottish Ale on tap at the same establishment (another reason I should have enjoyed the Quadrupel a little slower!). I’ve enjoyed Belhaven from a nitro can in the past but to have it on tap (nitro tap!) was awesome. It’s such a smooth beer with an excellent flavor. Yum!

I did happen to have a New Glarus Spotted Cow while I was working on my garden bed last week, but Spotted Cow is not close to those other two tap beers.

The Boards:

BOARDS SPOTLIGHT: Tessen

Tessen was the only game I played last week. The rest of my free time was spent on building my garden and reading Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance, which is amazing.

I taught Tessen to my brother-in-law who after the weekend was over mentioned that he wanted to play it more. It’s such a fun, light, and quick battle game that has you feeling tense as you are trying to collect sets of animals. If you’ve never played it, go pick it up from Van Ryder Games.

Designer’s Corner:

Since the garden and Words of Radiance were so prevalent last week I didn’t really do much game design. However, I did sit down for a while and put together some good ideas for Brooklyn Bridge. One of the things I’m working on is how to make the tower more appealing to build.

In the playtests that I’ve run so far it seems like it is VERY slow to develop. Players don’t seem to be incentivized enough to build the towers. And the whole point of the game is to build the bridge. SO I needed to come up with a better way to incentivize the actual building of the bridge. I think I figured that out last week. I’ve got a much better system in place that I’m hoping to try this week. Instead of having scoring bonuses for “area majority” in each section of the bridge I am switching it to physical rewards like an extra brick, money, or perhaps an advance token. This will also make the game move along more quickly. People will build. People will earn rewards. Rewards will help people build faster. And so on.

Hopefully I can revise my prototype this week and get it to the table.

And then I also hope I can work on Armada Galactica. I think this game has a potentially larger audience and it would be fun to design an awesome space-themed game. I’ll keep you posted.

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So those are the very few Boards & Barley I enjoyed last week. What did you enjoy?