High stacks: June KS Grumpy
Athena: JW, would you be interested in playing a meta-game? Shelfie Stacker is about gamers with mild OCD stacking game boxes on their shelves.
JW: Take a guess.
Athena: Hm. It looks like you could use some arrangement lessons. How about The Whatnot Cabinet? Place tiles and beat your own order.
JW: Seeing those tiles all neatly lined up makes me want to break things. Better keep them in the drawing bag. But you must love this: a new expansion for Hellenica: Story of Greece. Your motherland!
Athena: Right. Play against 20 AI opponents on a totally messed up map.
JW: Ancient Rome then? City Builder: Ancient World asks you to expand a Roman city and bring settlers in.
Athena: *yawn* Wake me up when Pecunia Non Olet gets a solo mode. Enough with tidying up, building and placing. How about some good old dungeon crawling? I see we have two this time: Mini Rogue, and DIE in the Dungeon.
JW: I'm certainly going to look into Mini Rogue, as it was one of my favourite 9-card games. But will it be more fun with 90 cards? There's beauty in simplicity.
Athena: And DIE in the Dungeon is dice manipulation with generic artwork. No beauty there. Next.
Athena: A month can't go by without a storybook game. Roll Player Adventures. Do you want to read a story starring the hero you made in Roll Player, JW? You will likely only play it once, of course.
JW: The fun of Roll Player is that you're only creating a character, then don't play with it. Just like when I spent 600 hours in Skyrim. All expansions to the game diminish this great original thought. If you add everything in, you'll end up with a $300 worth behemoth of been-there-done-that. And no, I don't want to read a storybook. I also don't want to play a mini-game while reading a good book, before I can continue.
Athena: 'Tacked on solo mode of the month' should probably be awarded to The Age of Atlantis. 'Highly competitive', 'you and your friends', no solo rules in the rulebook yet.
JW: Let's make that a real award! It will be easier than picking a Solitaire Select every month. What should we call it? Solitaire Stinker? Solitaire Sucker?
Athena: Wanna know what else sucks? Themes done over and over. Like dinosaurs. Oh, this is Dinosaurs 1944. Nazi dinos? Guaranteed tons of plastic by Petersen Games. Half a room for storage required.
JW: Have you seen Iron Sky 2 ?
Athena: No.
JW: Oh, sorry, that's not 1944. It's sci-fi.
Athena: Speaking of which. Here's some tiles for you, JW. 3D bling for Terraforming Mars. And a big box to store everything you've bought so far. Better start planning your shelf stacking.
JW: 3D? Cool! Don't need the big box though. I'll just bag the tiles and throw them on top. That's my kind of stacking, suckers.