Vacation in Montréal

Gen Con is less than a week away! 😱 We can barely contain our excitement. So what better way to wind down after a day of sightseeing, than to play some games at a board game café? 😉 We did just that by visiting the Randolph Pub Ludique in Montréal (and ate some Poutine of course 😋).

We played 🦀 Seaside first by Randolph Games (called Littoral in the French version), which is an awesome and simple game of chip collection. Players just draw chips from a bag and choose which side of the chip to activate. The goal is simple: your stack of chips has to be the highest when the bag is empty. All the chips have their little nuances, making this a fun tactical game with some push your luck elements. We already bought this game as we liked it so much, and I'm convinced it will be very popular. 😁

Then I saw 🎲 Noctiluca on the shelves, which I wanted to try. It's a game of dice drafting, to fill up jars with colored dice. It has a fun mechanic: players play their pieces on the border of the board and pick up every dice from a row showing the same number of pips they choose. ☝️ If you get more dice than you can use, the rest goes to your opponents, so you have to choose wisely. Quite good, but analysis paralysis could strike hard.

After ordering food we decided to grab something quick: Qawale and Quixo, two abstract games. Qawale is just outstanding, a mancala take on tic-tac-toe, and it's very satisfying to play. Quixo is also inspired by tic-tac-toe, but you have to pick up cubes and push them in from the end of rows/columns to line up your symbols. Also fun! ☺️

We wanted to play more, but exhaustion and jet lag was catching up to us. Finally we chose 🌳Arboretum as I've heard it mentioned a lot. It's a game about cleverly playing tree cards, making paths of ascending values orthogonally - but there are 6-10 tree types depending on player count, and you won't necessarily score them all. It's a clever concept but I felt like it needed too much brain power for what it is.

All in all it was a great night of games. And check out those potions we drank! 🤩🧪