The Nerdstream Era

You can buy things that are necessities. You can buy things that make your live comfortable. And you can buy absolute luxury items. This review is about the latter category. As you may know, I'm an avid boardgamer and also a sucker for cool consumer articles, so when I heard that there were tables made specifically for boardgaming, my interest was peaded. These things have a vault in which you play that you can over up with boards, so you can cover the game to eat, for example, or simply for storage until nex gaming season. They also have a ton of other extras. 

They're also pretty expensive, so I started saving up, you know, just in case. Last year I started shopping around in earnest to find a manufacturer I wanted to trust with the job. While I first heard about these monsters from Geekchic, their location in the US basically ruled them out, so I was settled with the two European manufacturers (there are also some others producing simpler and cheaper versions, but only two getting you want I will talk about): Geeknson (UK) and Rathskellers (Greece). I finally settled for Geeknson, mainly for reasons of price and because I didn't get a good argument on why to spend 1000€ more on Rathskellers. So, on to it: what does this thing do? And does it work? 

There are many strategic boardgames that encourage a strategy usually called "turtling": you build up an army and surround yourself in defenses. You know, just like turtles. Just without the army. Not many strategy games really encourage aggressiveness, and the reason for this is that it's hard to pull off in the game system in two ways: first, you need everyone on board with this, because many people don't react well to aggression, and second, you need a system that actively incentivizes aggression while hurting the defensive guys. If that description appeals to you, Kemet is your game. 

One nerd-issue I deeply care about I haven't written about at all on Nerdstream yet, which is something I intend to remedy. So, let's start a new series of boardgame reviews that present you some of my all-time favorites. One warning in advance: the boardgames I am to present to you aren't exactly the family-friendly stuff. They aren't reaching the complexity levels that some tabletops and cosims do, but they usually run several hours and require a good understanding of pretty complex rules. That's being said, let's launch into the first issue of the new series and review a special favorite of mine: Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition, published by Fantasy Flight Games.