Unboxed the Board Game Blog

The joyful starling song, the rustling of leaves in the trees, the gentle sounds of the babbling brook, were all but rendered silent by banging and hammering as Meeples took to the french countryside and paved over the lot of it! Yes, we’re back with another Game Night Review and we’re talking about the four games I consider to be “Classics” Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, #TicketToRide and this week #Carcassonne. Let’s have a quick look at how the game plays and then we’ll get

The Petting Zoo is a simple expansion that comes as part of the Polar Bear or Rio Grande Expansion #1 (they’re both the same but have different names on each side of the pond.) Theme More and more children are coming to you zoo to see your fabulous animals, but what they like best of all are the babies. So, the zoo board commissions a new enclosure, aimed specifically at housing your baby animals, thus generating more money for the zoo! Unboxed 5 x Petting Zoo Boards Playing

On the face of it Aquaretto appears to be a simple retheme of Zooloretto with meeples because, well, games have to have meeples. But actually it’s an entirely different animal. Theme You are the manager of a Water Zoo, planning where exactly on your big grassy field you can build your basins for all the aquatic animals that are arriving (somewhat randomly) at your Zoo. Luckily you have some offers of land from local farmers which is available for purchase, so you can expand a

You are the owner of a small zoo, so small in fact that you have but three enclosures and a rather large barn. Throughout the game you will receive animals for your zoo, although not necessarily the ones you want, it seems that your zoo suffers from a lot of clerical errors. When all the animals have run out (possibly through extinction or deforestation) the player with the most animals in enclosures and not in the barn will be declared supreme Zoo Master. So the theme is a b

Yes, this really is a review of what is, in effect, a starting tile, however the River and the River II, when combined do something really interesting. The Point The point of the Rivers is to replace the original starting tile in Carcassonne offering players more options from the start of the game as well as helping to spread them out. Unboxed So what do you get in this tiny little box? 12 Tiles Rules Yup, twelve, very nicely made, tiles. There is a spring, which is identical

Stone Age was my first worker placement game, it’s produced by Hans Im Glück/Rio Grande Games and it is possibly the most beautiful game in my collection. Admittedly that’s not that hard a prize to achieve, but Stone Age is gorgeous. Anyway, that’s enough drooling, let's get on and look at the game. Da Story Once upon a time, a long time ago, people lived in caves and hunted saber toothed animals of all shaped and sizes. Then along came the stone age, the industrial age of t

What is it? Traders and Builders in an expansion for the core game, but it is one that you will always play with once you introduce it (like the River) rather than something you might add or take away. T&B is the second expansion to the core game, but the first one I’ve bought, check out the unboxed section below for the reason why. What does it do? As the title suggests T&B adds traders who work out of completed cities, builders who help complete the sprawling roads and cit