The board gamer's dream vacation...

We are on vacation! 🏖️ And a very special one at that: 🥳 We are visiting LeiriaCon for the very first time. It is a cozy board game event about a 1,5h drive from Lisbon, Portugal, set in a charming resort hotel directly on the Atlantic coast. Yesterday was the official first day, and unlike the bigger conventions we are used to, everything here has a calm, relaxed vibe. It’s all about pure gaming, pretty much 24/7. Which also makes us want to play non-stop, so it‘s a pity we need to sleep sometimes. 😅 Especially as our last few days were very eventful.

We had a great first day, having played more than 10 new games! We focused on lighter games to have an easier time learning rules - but today we might dive into heavier stuff. 🙃 We also met up with some Instagram friends and played a few games together! 🥰

I’ll definitely write some thoughts about the games we played, but for now maybe I‘ll just highlight 3 that stood out.

We kicked off the day with 🖼️ Art Society with Daniel & Carolina aka. @thebgcollector. It's a clever combination of bidding and tile-laying, as players collect paintings to display on their wall. You want to match picture frames next to each other, but not painting types! Also, every non-chosen painting in a round raises the prestige of that painting type, and you want to speculate well what will go up in value for end game scoring. The bidding with 1-20 values felt a bit loose but it was fun.

Next up: 👑 Regicide -  a game I’ve been wanting to try for a long time. It's basically just a deck of playing cards, but it's a fun co-op game as you try to defeat the four jacks, queens and kings to win, by cleverly playing cards and using their suit’s powers.

We wrapped up the day with ☀️ Suna Valo, a 2-player game of tableau building in a solarpunk world. This is definitely a thematic continuation of Planta Nubo, the illustrations and overall feel is very similar. The gameplay is different though. You get cards and place them into columns, activating the whole column. Resources you generate are used to fulfill different contracts, which in turn unlock things from your player board. It's pretty good!